When we comment on drafts of student writing or public speaking, we can easily get caught up in editing the minutiae instead of responding to the content. (Note here I refer to preparation of speeches, i.e, the writing.) Too often, when we do this, students respond in turn with superficial revision.
However, comments on student drafts can encourage meaningful revision. To understand how to comment usefully, we need to understand revision. I don’t mean to oversimplify revision. It can be highly idiosyncratic, dependent on who is writing what for why, and recursive. Still, it can be useful to think of revision as having two aspects: local and global.
Local revision means tinkering with format, mechanics, grammar, words, organization (flow between paragraphs and sentences, transitions). While these are essential matters, novice writers often get caught up in local revision too early, to the exclusion of global revision. The good news is that working with sentences or organization can, in fact, often does, signal deeper problems to the experienced writer and thus lead to global revision. The bad news is, if comments stay at the local level, the novice writer usually does, too.
Global revision means questioning everything, pulling prose apart and reorganizing it, checking logic, adding detail, deleting irrelvancies, going new directions. Think of times when you are writing and experiencing “flow,” when you are “in the zone,” and you don’t even notice time going past. You’re caught up in the ideas and in communicating them. It’s a process that can even be generative—it’s what is meant by that oft-repeated mantra that we don’t know what we think until we write.
Getting students into that zone is certainly difficult. In a good writing class, not everything is graded because grading turns on the writer’s internal monitor, that tendency to criticize every idea based solely on correctness and adherence to rules. The monitor is the enemy of creativity. We have to turn attention away from the monitor to foster new ideas or deeper development. Monitoring prose for correctness should come later, in the final editing/proofreading stage.
When you comment, just as when you compose, you need to turn down the monitor for a while. Before you worry about the details, read or skim the whole, and get a sense of what the overarching goals are or should be. Find and trace the argument, look for a claim (or thesis), the quality and quantity of evidence (data, examples, use of authority), acknowledgement of audience (level of language formality, for example), and depth of development. As you read, look for places where you would ask a mature writer questions. Then write comments that point to specific moments in the text that require more revision—claims not supported, assumptions that shouldn’t be made, insufficient or inadequate examples. That’s the tipping point.
When you are ready to make comments about local matters, be picky. Often those related to word choice also signal problems with audience, so instead of pointing out each “wrong” choice, point out one or two and make a comment about audience. Problems related to organization can often be related to inadequate logic, and those of garbed sentences may not just be “awkward” but may also indicate the writer hasn’t thought something through. A few comments about the local matters are enough. Attend to the global.
Because examples are a better way to demonstrate a point, here’s one from student writing, disguised to protect identity, from a paper on ethics:
Personal ethics are a set of principles that we establish to make the right judgment when we encounter a problem. Generally personal ethics is related to common morality, because most of our personal ethics are shaped by common morality. In addition, personal ethics of people also depend on their upbringing, education, and religion. My upbringing is the foundation of my personal ethics because I grew up witnessing my mother being too lenient and letting others take advantage of her. For example, she would always pay for freeloaders at dinner and never protest, which cost her financially and emotionally. Hence we have to treat everyone equally and not take advantage of others, no matter what their circumstances.
In the first three sentences the writer builds a case for what personal ethics are and what factors go into forming them. Then the writer uses a two-sentence personal example, and the argument falls apart. Notice how the “For example” sentence moves from the sole example to a universal statement of ethics, rather than making the point about how personal ethics are formed? The pivotal sentences are italicized. That’s the spot to isolate in a comment, such as:
You write that your personal ethics were influenced by your upbringing and imply that was the only influence, but you stated that common morality, education, and religion also influence personal ethics. Didn’t they influence you? You give only one example, not a very strong one, for such a profound impact on you. Was your mother really emotionally affected by paying for dinners, or was there something more significant happening?
By attending to the sufficiency of the example, the student can revise the major problem. The last sentence can wait, and in fact, it may be fixed with a revision because the comment reminds the writer of the structure of the paragraph—from general, to personal.
Your commenting mantra for drafts: focus on the global first, the local last.