Judging Writing, Judging Selves

Abstract

One effects writing-as-process movement has been to change way many teachers evaluate student writing. While most teachers writing still assign grades to papers at some point in course instruction, emphasis has shifted summative to formative evaluation, or, in language process advocates, a teacher's role as judge to one coach. Nancy Sommers and others have taught us that evaluative comments on students' texts should serve as aids in revising rather than as justifications particular grades. While many us have been influenced by these discussions, literature on writing evaluation restricts process evaluation to means evaluation, largely teachers' and peers' responses to student writing. This literature tends to assume that a broad consensus exists about what constitutes good writing and that we can recognize good writing when we see it. Absent most current discussions evaluation is an older notion process reflected in etymology term. The Latin roots evaluation are ex + VALUE-to be out of or from value. Each judgment value is made some notion value, usually a notion that is widely shared within a culture. College writing research in disciplinary period which began, roughly, in mid 1960s has not told us much about exactly what it is that teachers value in student writing. Researchers who have used statistical methodologies to address this question have thrown little light on issue. The only consistent finding has been that length essays is associated with judgments quality. 1 Textbooks, by and large, are little help because they speak good writing in general terms such as those Michael Adelstein and Jean Pival use to define good writing: clear, concise, effective, interesting, and projecting the authentic voice writer (6). And guidelines published by English departments-at least at places where I've taught-are even less specific. An A paper is one that displays unusual competence; hence, an A paper is an A paper. One explanation why definitions good writing are either circular or

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.