Nancy Sommers

Responding to Student Writing by Nancy Sommers is an academic article that focuses on teachers commenting in student writing. This articles purpose is to open the eye of every teacher there is out there and have them realize that not every single comment made on student writing is beneficial to students and their writing. These types of comments are also useful to question or show any discrepancy in our writing “that we, as writers, are blind to.” (Sommers, 1982, p.148) In order to prove herself, Sommers started a study based off of 35 teachers, the comments the teachers wrote on first and second drafts and interviews of both the teachers and the students that the writing belonged to. In her study Sommers found that “teachers do not respond to student writing with the kind of thoughtful commentary which will help students to engage with the issues they are writing about or which will help them link about heir purposes and goals in writing a specific text.” (Sommers, 1982, p.154) What Sommers meant by her first point is that teachers take comments and use them as a way to grammatically correct a student’s writing and not engage the student further into the topic, which in turn will be useless because the student only makes those changes the final draft will look exactly the same or worse. On the second point Sommers also points out that many of the teachers take commenting as a mean for appropriating a student’s text. She notes that instead of teachers letting students express how or what they feel the teacher turns around and makes the writing say or sound in the way they want or think is the “right-way”. In order to make better writers Sommers suggest that “we need to reverse this approach” (Sommers, 1982, p.154) and have a change in action by starting on trying to give students thoughtful comments. These comments are both positive and important to writers because they are needed in order to show when an idea has been communicated or when it has not. By taking the authors research and my past experiences I would have to agree because I have been in the situation when I do not understand the topic and when I read the teachers comments I have no idea if I am headed in the right direction or not. This will come to great use in future use of peer-reviewing.