Teachers' Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers

Abstract

As far back as we can trace student papers, we can see the attempts of teachers to squeeze their reactions into a few pithy phrases, to roll all their strength and all their sweetness up into one ball for student delectation. Every teacher of composition has shared in this struggle to address students, and writing helpful comments is one of the skills most teachers wish to develop toward that end. Given that writing evaluative commentary is one of the great tasks we share, one might think it would have been one of the central areas of examination in composition studies. Indeed, a number of thoughtful examinations of written teacher commentaries exist, most of them measuring empirically the comments of a relatively small teacher and student population. No studies we could find, however, have ever looked at large numbers of papers commented on by large numbers of teachers. We do not have, in other words, any large-scale knowledge of the ways that North American teachers and students tend to interact through written assessments. There are clear logistical reasons for this lack of large-scale studies; the gathering and analysis of a large data base are daunting tasks, and evaluating rhetorical (as opposed to formal) commentary is a challenge. But we had the data base gathered from previous research, and in the great tradition of fools rushing in where wise number-crunchers fear to tread, we thought we'd take a look at this question of teacher commentary. As inveterate historical kibbitzers, we naturally started research by asking what sorts of comments teachers had made on student papers in the past. Have teacher comments become more or less prescriptive, longer or shorter, more positive or more negative? We headed for the stacks to try to find out. Rather to our amazement, we discovered that what we were proposing to look at-

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