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Responding to Student Writing Assignments

Module by: The Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication. E-mail the author

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The most important ideas we can give you . . .

  • Link the assignment’s purpose to the criteria you apply to the writing. Comment on how an aspect of the writing contributes to or fails to accomplish the goal (for example, to show how the design exceeds the performance of existing designs).
  • There’s no good science or engineering or economics that isn’t ALSO good writing of its kind. Communication is an integral part of every field.
  • You’re not solely responsible for teaching the student EVERYTHING about writing. Distributing the responsibility over all faculty in the University will ensure that the individual student keeps learning and that the fundamentals, such as organizing information to meet audiences’ needs and formulating a comprehensive purpose for a given piece of writing, will be reinforced many times during the student’s education.
  • Decide whether you’re giving ranking feedback (“here’s where you stand in the class: “A,” “B,” “87” etc.) or process feedback (“here’s how to accomplish the goals of the assignment better”). A “checkmark” doesn’t give either kind of feedback.
  • To give process feedback, use description (what you see) and advice (what the student might do) to improve the next time around or on revision. Don’t label what you see with an evaluative term: “This is awkward.” Write “this sentence contains three different ideas, but I couldn’t see the relationship.”
  • Limit your comments to the most important aspects of the writing. Don’t comment on EVERYTHING. It will take you too long and will demoralize the writer. Writers can usually focus on no more than three kinds of changes in their processes at any one time. Help them choose where to focus their effort.
  • You can comment on or emphasize DIFFERENT aspects of writing in different assignments. (For example, you could give written comments ONLY on the problem statement or the quality of the discussion and use points only for other aspects). This will limit your responsibility in grading. Have one assignment in which all these aspects are supposed to come together.
  • Don’t be an “editor,” making changes without explanation. Often the student will imagine the wrong reason for the change and follow that inference in the future.
  • Say something good about what you read. It takes four positive strokes to make a writer brave enough to accept one negative criticism.

Use your responses to teach writing AND your subject

Students will care about how they write if you respond to WHAT they write. Comment on their insight, their main idea, their reasons, their purposes, their grasp of the subject, and their sense of how much detail or logic they needed to make their case. Students will disregard corrections of subject-verb agreement, punctuation, and so on if they have nothing to do with what they were trying to say about the subject. The syntax and grammar of language are instrumental: they enable us to construct relationships between ideas, between ideas and evidence, and between ourselves and our readers. If you comment on errors that prevent them from achieving their communication purpose and from using their scientific knowledge to create meaning, they will listen and (sometimes) remember the correction when they do their next assignment. Use your comments to help them BE the disciplinary specialist you’re inviting them to be in your class.

Things to bring to students’ attention

  • The science or engineering tasks that their writing should demonstrate
  • The level of detail students should include about their work. All the calculations? If so, where? Definitions? Diagrams of equipment or descriptions of procedures?
  • The needs of different audiences
  • What other students have found difficult. Students like to know how to avoid the pitfalls that ensnare others
  • What bigger triumphs lie ahead if current rehearsals or partial performances are done carefully—how to connect what they’re doing now with future challenges
  • What to understand about the kind of learning experience your course offers. Some students have no idea that college courses may be substantially different from high school courses. They also fail to detect the overall shape of a course and the pattern of assignments or sequences of work. What’s the basis of your course? Tell them so they can see how the writing should display their learning. Is your course organized from
    • Simple to complex? (basic reactions to complex reactions, simple problems to complex ones)
    • Discrete elements to synthesis? (for example, separate parts of a plant design to a whole system)
    • Separate topics/problems? (environmental policy, ethics of regulation, international agreements)
    • Historical sequence? (early attempts to solve a particular problem, contemporary attempts in different regions, proposed approaches for the future)

In each of these course types, writing assignments can serve different purposes: making connections or representing bigger problems, or comparing historical evidence, for example. Students need to know that the writing will help them achieve the purpose and strategic learning objectives of your particular course.

Evaluating Samples of Student Writing and Contrasting Responses

In the following table, imagine what the student writer might make of the comments in the columns on either side. The two outside columns show the comments of two different graders who looked at this report. This is a “B+“ lab report: not awful, but not excellent either. Some comments in each column might be useful. Mark each one that gives a good way of spotting a type of problem or a good way of fixing it. Few writers can fix what they can’t find, so both aspects are important. If you have a colleague who’s on coffee break, discuss your choices with her or with him.

Table 1
Instructor A Student Text from an Electrical Engineering Lab Instructor B
Jerky section here; doesn’t flow. Confusing, too.Why use passive voice here?This is a really slow start to your report. Section One: This section of our report describes the design of the clock generator. It also describes the pulse generator circuits for the R327. The clock generator is a portion of the circuit that produces a square wave that is used as a system clock signal. This signal is for the whole computer. One single pulse exactly one clock cycle wide is produced by the pulse generator each time a pushbutton is pushed. It can be used for single stepping the R327 and for loading it. It can also be used for viewing its memory. Go through and combine short sentences to eliminate unnecessary repetitions and words that the reader understands without your saying them, such as “of our report.” Watch out for pronouns here. Which “it” do you think the reader will understand?
You’re describing sets of things here. Try putting these in a bulleted list to make the set easier to grasp.A data block is a set of numbers; some audiences prefer the more familiar term.Don’t forget the carry-ins. Section 2: Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU). . . . A. The ALUThe ALU accepts two eight-bit numbers (A0-A7), B0-B7), a three-bit operation code (X0-X2) and two one-bit fields, RI and CI, used for right and left rotation and carry in, respectively. The outputs are an eight-bit number (Y0-Y7), and four one-bit fields: RO used for right rotation; C used for left rotation and carries; O used to indicate overflow; and Z used to indicate a Y=zero. Instructor B inserts text, shown at left
Integrate information on two types into preceding sentenceTell a little about what these areAre you speaking of one register or multiple registers? Section 3: Bus, Memories, and Registers This section of the R327 implements memories, registers, and the system bus. The single system bus allows for the transfer of information one byte at a time between the registers, memories, and ALU. There are two separate memories: the instruction memory (IM) and the data memory (DM). Each is reserved exclusively for its designated information type (data or instruction). The registers IN, OUT, TP, MA, IR, ACC, and PC are necessary to perform specific functions. Depending on the function, the register may need to read data off of the bus, drive the bus, or both. The bus, memories, and registers are connected as shown in Figure 18. Duh!This sentence says nothing.

You have years of experience writing documents of the type you’re assigning, so you know much more about how your student writers should make decisions than you think you know. You can supply guidance that people outside your field can’t give students. Try to help them internalize the rules of thumb that guide good writers in your discipline.

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