Feedback

As you work on your essays, you will get feedback from the teacher and classmates. The specific nature of the feedback will depend on your progress through the writing process.  In response to early drafts, readers focus on global issues such as these: Is the thesis clear and appropriate to the assignment? Is the paper well organized and easy to follow? Is the argument supported persuasively?  Are examples well chosen? 

In response to later drafts, readers focus on local issues such as sentence structure, wording, punctuation, and documentation.

Teachers have many options for organizing feedback. You may encounter one or more of these structures:

• Individual conference with the instructor
  Conferences are scheduled outside of class time, so you’ll need to clear 20 or 30 minutes from your schedule.
• Workshop (also known as “peer response group” or “peer review group”)
  Working in pairs or small groups, students share their impressions of each writer’s draft and offer suggestions for revision.  The instructor may schedule workshops outside of class time, when he or she can also participate.
• Whole-class workshop
  The class offers a thorough critique of one draft, giving all or most of the class period to a discussion of the paper’s strengths, its weaknesses, and directions for revision.
• Online response
  Working in pairs or groups, students exchange papers electronically, using Blackboard or email, and give each other written feedback.

Although it can be unnerving to have your work read and criticized, feedback is an essential part of a composition course: there’s really no way to know whether a text will have the desired effect—whether it will be understood as you intended it to be—except to try it out on live human readers.  Workshops in composition classes are good preparation for the writing practices of professional workplaces, where important documents are routinely circulated for comments and criticism.