Michael Noltemeyer

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Giving More Efficient Feedback on Student Writing

Written by Michael Noltemeyer and Morgan Gross

Responding to student writing is one of the most time-consuming tasks for many college instructors. It is also one of the most important.

Fortunately, it is often possible to make your feedback on student writing more efficient and more effective at the same time. With final drafts and papers right around the corner, here are three suggestions that may save you some time (and your students’ grades!).

The Rule of Three

“Overcommenting does more harm than good. Students become overwhelmed and discouraged; teachers get exhausted.”
—Sommers, Responding to Student Writers, p. 4

You can’t possibly comment on everything you see in a single draft—and students can’t take in everything you see, either. That means trying to give too much feedback is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive.

Instead, quickly read the whole draft before making any comments (even marginal notes) so you can decide what to focus on. Identify your three biggest concerns, prioritizing higher-order issues like focus and organization over lower-order issues like grammar and style. Be specific in explaining what the issue is and how to fix it, making reference to classroom instruction and class resources wherever possible. If there are more than three big issues that need to be addressed, ask to see a new draft once students have revised to address the first three.

Don’t forget to praise students for what they’re already doing well! Sometimes we think of feedback simply as a tool to justify a grade, but the primary objective for responding to students’ writing should always be to encourage their learning and growth. And everyone is encouraged when they can see evidence of progress. That means pointing out the progress you can see (but they may not) is just as important as pointing out opportunities for further growth.

Let Students Lead

“If students believe that the purpose of comments is to justify a grade or to correct their mistakes, they won’t read their teachers’ comments with any sense of agency or engagement… To become confident and capable writers, students need to participate in a dialogue about their writing.”
—Sommers, p. 9

One of the biggest reasons teachers feel overburdened in responding to student writing is the belief that all feedback must start with them. But in addition to increasing your workload, that belief can get in the way of student learning. Instead, lighten your load by letting them take the lead so they can learn more in the process!

For instance, conferences are an important tool—but a meeting in which you do almost all the talking isn’t really a conference. It’s a lecture. Instead, start a conference by asking the student about their process, their progress, and their struggles. You can and should still point out higher-order concerns they don’t bring up, but letting students ask for help where they feel they need it gives them a sense of ownership over their text. It also gives you insight into their thinking so that you can target your feedback. A two-minute conference early in the drafting process can make a huge difference in the final paper.

Reflections can serve the same purpose, and they are an especially good choice within the context of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm that guides Jesuit education. They can also save you a tremendous amount of time in reading revisions: just ask students to highlight the things they’ve changed and explain how their choices improved the draft. If students are consistently submitting paratextual reflections to accompany their assignments, then your feedback ceases to be a monologue and instead becomes a response in a running conversation about their writing. That dialogue helps them calibrate the sense of genre expectations that you’ve already internalized.

Focus on Goals and Values

“[C]omments … need both to evaluate the strengths and limitations of the current paper and to provide transportable lessons for future assignments.”
—Sommers, p. 5

Most college writing assignments aim more at process than product. We’re usually trying to help students improve as writers. It doesn’t matter as much whether this particular piece of writing will make a significant contribution to the field, we reason, because continued improvements will make possible bigger contributions down the road. But if it’s improvement we have in mind, then we need to focus on transfer: what do we want students to take away? And how will they show us (and themselves) whether they have improved or not?

In most cases, the quality of students’ process and product alike will immediately go up with greater clarity around our expectations. Sometimes we suffer from the “curse of knowledge”: we know so much about our fields that we forget to explain all the stylistic conventions we have internalized and all the rhetorical strategies that we learned through trial and error when we were students. Clarity also serves social justice: the students most impacted when we fail to unpack our expectations are those with the least prior exposure, which only reinforces privilege. The more you can tell students upfront about what you want, the better the papers you’ll get in return.

Though it may not save you time this semester, you can also use the summer to revise your own prompts and rubrics in response to the implicit feedback you’re getting from your students right now. If their writing is formulaic and boring, for instance, then maybe you can assign a different project next semester that you’d be excited to read. You might tie process and product together so that even as students are practicing their writing, they’re already doing something that matters. Give them a real-world audience to write for, a real problem to solve, or both. And give them assignment-specific rubrics that reflect what you value, have been teaching them about writing in the classroom, and want them to take away after the semester is over. If grammar is not the focus of your class, for example, then it probably shouldn’t be the focus of your rubric or your feedback. No first draft is perfect—but fortunately, writing assignments get better with revision, too!

Additional Resources

Adler-Kassner, Linda & Peggy O’Neill. Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning, Utah St. UP, 2010.

Bokas, Arina. “Grading Practices That Grow Writers.” NCTE, 2017.

Carillo, Ellen C. The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading. UP of Colorado, 2021.

Hattie, John & Helen Timperley. “The Power of Feedback.” Review of Educational Research 77.1, 2007.

Inoue, Asao & Mya Poe, eds. Race and Writing Assessment. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

Sommers, Nancy. Responding to Student Writers. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013.