Responding to Student Writing

Responding to student's writing is a process that is commonly done several times throughout the week in the classroom. Teachers take their students' writing and read over it in attempts to have them revise it or to grade it. However, many "teacher's comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focusing that attention on the teacher's purpose in commenting". Why is this seen as being detrimental to students' writing?

When I was in elementary and middle school, we had workshops where we would submit our rough drafts to our teachers to look at on certain occasions. My teacher would then write comments as to what I needed to change in order to make my paper flawless. Naturally, I would do as I was told and follow her instructions and score a higher grade on the final draft. What I never realized, until this article, was that the teacher comments do take away from the students' writing.

From the article by Sommers "Responding to Student Writing", she explains how influential teacher's comments are to students and how they have the ability to change the voice of the text. As she states, "After the comments of the teacher are imposed on the first or second draft, the student's attention dramatically shifts from "This is what I want to say" to "This is what you the teacher is trying to say". Students' final drafts are rarely that way that they originally intended them to be. Teacher's need to be careful as to how they respond to student writing by working with the student to make corrections, but not change the intent of the writing piece itself.