Summary on "Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers

In the article Responding to Student Writing, Nancy Sommers with Lil Brannon and Cyril Knoblach conduce research on teachers and their commenting styles of their students. Sommers explicitly emphasizes how comments have affected students writing in terms of the student writers derive from their original message, solely to meet the "guidelines" for writing a good paper. 


Sommers points out that comments are important because teachers feel the need to provide assistance for their students; without comments, students will feel that their paper has properly emphasized their ideas. Confusion strikes student writers, "The teacher appropriates the text from the student by confusing the student's purpose in writing the text with her own purpose in commenting." (Sommers, 1982)  The usage of the verb "appropriates" identifies that teachers don't necessarily pay attention to the paper, but rather set apart what's written to establish some sort of correction of their own. Student writers often level the importance of the correction over the importance of the meaning and ideas. 


This article states that comments are genuinely important when revising a paper, but the process of doing so conflicts with the normative of revising a paper. Sommers goes on to explain that generic comments or grammatical corrections aren't as useful as the years of workshop trainings go on to explain. Many teachers use the same "rubber-stamped" comments, which may not be effective. A rubber-stamp comment is a comment that can be interchanged between papers; this does not expose interest in students writing which may ultimately put students into an  unmotivated mood. 


Sommers concludes her research findings in a very ironic way by saying that teachers must revise their commenting/revising strategies. This will help writers organize their priorities of what their writing and how they're writing it. I completely agree with Sommers because of my own experience, It never struck me that my ideas were being pushed aside due to grammatical corrections and what professional writers expect. I can use this idea to cohesively write a paper/essay without thinking too much about "how" it should look like. Sommers findings are related to the current subject in my English class because we're always in a process of writing without concentrating too much on grammatical errors. 




Bibliography

Sommers, N. (1982). Responding to student writing. College Composition and Communication 33(2), 148-156.