A Quick Reference Guide for Written Feedback

Priority 1: Lesson Selection

It is a challenge to follow written advice about writing. Some research suggests that students implement about 60% of the revision issues targeted by instructors. To improve the adoption rate for your advice, focus on one or two revision needs, driven by as much as is practicable by the student’s announced concerns.

Prioritizing higher order concerns is key to Written Feedback, just like it is in the work we do face-to-face. Although we want to avoid the “we don’t teach grammar” response, we also want to avoid anything that a student might see as solely editing or proofreading help. When a student requests grammar or proofreading over all other concerns, please touch briefly on their concerns, provide them with links to the Writer’s Handbook, let them know about relevant Writing Center workshops, but spend the bulk of your time and your comments on global issues.

Priority 2: Lesson Structure

In The Online Writing Conference, Beth Hewett argues that students who are reading instruction about writing benefit most from learning information in this order:

1. WHAT issue your lesson will target
2. WHY that issue can pose an important problem for readers
3. HOW the student can change the existing text to resolve that problem

We strongly recommend using this structure when you write your overall comment or comments at the top of the student’s draft. As an instructor, I prefer a 1-sentence formulation for #1 and a separate sentence for #2. Number 3 is, of course, the bulk of your instruction and can’t be rendered formulaically.

Priority 3: Personalized, Tailored Interaction​

Remember that students choose to work with us because they are looking for feedback they can’t get from a writer’s handbook or other static source. Please do all you can to help our writers feel like we are communicating with them vividly, engaging them in a conversation about their particular writing and needs. Ideally, they’ll want to come back, they’ll tell their friends, and we’ll build our audience: one student writer at a time.

Approaches to Commenting & Feedback

• Use praise to teach writers how they can help their readers: “Your transition from X to Y helps me as a reader see your argument develop. Great job!”
  • Say what the student is doing well and how the draft or reader benefits from this. Students don’t always know what’s working in their draft, so it’s important that this is identified so that students can continue to develop these competencies.
• Choose to have a global-comments-focused or embedded-comments-focused response, depending on the needs of the assignment.
• Read through the prompt (if available) and ensure that the student is meeting expectations for the genre. If you’re not sure what you should be commenting on in a draft, this is a great place to start.
• Make feedback as specific and clear as possible. Over-explain rather than be concise and explain one idea in multiple ways. 
• When possible link to resources that explain your feedback in more detail so that if a student is confused or unclear on the concept, they can do more research.
• If you can relate to the student’s concerns or experience, say this in your comments. Writing to your student from a personal perspective is encouraged.
• Show that you are responsive to students’ concerns by echoing the words from their submission form in your response.
• Refer from global comments to embedded comments and back again, to help students see patterns.
• Ask substantive questions that can’t be answered with a yes or no. ​
• You’re not there to edit their paper, but to give advice to help them develop as a writer, to build their rhetorical awareness.
• When there are a lot of proofreading/grammatical errors, comment on only the first paragraph, then give them strategies for proofreading—googling phrases they’re unsure about, comparing their phrases to the literature they cite.
  • Choose just one grammatical issue to address if there are several.

Matter of Time

It’s okay to focus on just a few pieces of feedback–don’t feel as though you need to help to make the draft perfect.

​​Read the draft strategically, focusing on the introduction and just a few sentences from each paragraph: is there a main claim? Does it run through all the paragraphs? Do the paragraphs use evidence persuasively? Do the introduction and conclusion ably frame the draft?

Automate what you can. Create a template that guides students in understanding your Written Feedback, one that reflects your voice and personality as an instructor and saves you some composing time from one appointment to the next. The feedback itself (including your overall comments) should of course be individualized for each student.

It’s okay to stop reading a draft if most of your time for it has elapsed. Just note where you stopped reading and work on giving your headnote comments.

Sometimes you’ll need to make a choice about whether to give in-depth headnote comments or in-text comments. Decide what makes the most sense for this draft and focus your attention on one or the other.

Written Feedback Templates

Because time for Written Feedback is limited, it is important for you to develop a Written Feedback template that is responsive to your pedagogical approach, teaching style, and voice. Since all drafts are different, you may want to develop a few different types of templates that can respond to varying student needs.

Template Essentials

• Include your name and role.

• • My name is Bucky, and I’ll be your Writing Center instructor for this draft.
  • I’m Bucky Badger, a Writing Center instructor and doctoral student in English, and I’m happy to offer some feedback on this draft of your Journalism 202 essay.

• Share the structure of the feedback.

• • Here at the top of your draft I offer some general feedback on 1 or 2 important revision issues. Below, in the actual text of your draft, I’ve included [bold and bracketed comments] that point to specific opportunities for revision.
  • Here at the top of your draft, I offer some general feedback on an important revision issue. Below, in the actual text of your draft, I’ve included comments that point to specific opportunities for revision. I suggest that you read the overall comments first as they help contextualize the inserted comments.

• Respond to the student’s concerns

• • You asked for feedback addressing proofreading issues, but as your reader I was not distracted by those issues. Instead, I saw your thesis statement as a slightly more important revision issue.

• Give explicit advice about how to use the instruction.

• • The most important revision issues are described here in my overall advice, so I recommend starting with that. Then go on to the more local issues I describe in the comments I embedded in your draft.
  • Some students find it easier to print out this response and then check off revision issues as you apply them in your typed draft.

• Invite students to submit new drafts.
• • As you continue working on this draft, I hope that you’ll come back to the Writing Center for further feedback. Because many students find that working with the same instructor throughout a project can be useful, I invite you to make another appointment with me. I have availability for Written Feedback on Tuesdays and you can meet with me through a Virtual Meeting on Mondays from 1-3 PM.

Quick Links to the Writer’s Handbook

To give writers more context for the lessons in your Written Feedback, include links to resources that explain your feedback in more detail. While online resources can help to supplement your instruction, note that it is still very important to follow the advice above about explaining in your own words WHAT issue your lesson will target, WHY that issue can pose an important problem for readers, and HOW the student can change the existing text to resolve that problem. After doing this, referring the student to additional resources can supplement your instruction.