Premise: To respond to in-progress writing is to intervene in the writer's process. Such intervention should help the process move forward and should give the writer clearer notions of both what to revise and how to revise. Thus, responding is something quite different from grading. The best response writers can receive is that which will make them want to keep writing. 

Premise: Because our educational culture is so preoccupied with error, we need to "go back to school" and learn how to praise. Paul B. Diederich¹ concluded from his research in evaluation for the Educational Testing Service that "noticing and praising whatever a student does well improves writing more than any kind or amount of correction of what he does badly, and that it is especially important for the less able writers who need all the encouragement they can get." 
  

According to Richard Straub and Ronald F. Lunsford², we should follow these guidelines when responding to student writing:

1. Respond to student writing in well-developed marginal and/or end comments.

2. Focus on large conceptual issues, as opposed to sentence-level concerns.

3. Respond to student writing at various stages in the writing process.

4. Mark relatively few grammatical and mechanical errors, and save treatment of error until late in the writing process.

5. Individualize my comments to the text at hand.

6. Focus my comments on a limited number of concerns in a given paper.

7. Balance positive and negative comments.

8. Allow my developing sense of the students' identities to personalize my comments.

9. Focus on the students as learners as well as on the texts they are producing.

10. Ask more questions and give more descriptions of my reading process; be less directive and evaluative.
 
 

Response Grid

Model Marking

Peer Response
 
 
 

2. Twelve Readers Reading: Responding to College Student Writing (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1995)