RE: The state of State

["Youngblood, Susan" <susan -dot- youngblood -at- ttu -dot- edu>]

Bruce Byfield wrote:
 
   To be fair, you don't really know what "reviewed" in this case means.
   Your client could be exaggerating a very casual reading. Equally likely,
   he could be ignoring some advice he did receive, possibly because he
   didn't understand it.

   I ran into these sorts of attitudes all the time when I was teaching
   English at a university. No matter how carefully I explained that I was
   commenting only on structure, not grammar, or described the more common
   errors that the student should edit before handing the paper into me,
   some students would completely ignore the context of the comments and
   feel aggrieved when the paper was actually marked.
 
I am currently teaching as a Graduate Part-Time Instructor, and I find I have the same problems with students that Bruce describes. Let me first say that I do have some excellent students who not only heed advice for critiqued papers but also apply what they've learned from these comments to future work. Our technical communication students are particularly good about this. These students are the exception.
 
Other students sometimes don't make corrections even when my advice is explicit. I provide ample comments on patterns of error, but I see the same errors in papers at the end of the semester. Furthermore, the student in question may have asked the instructor to look at the content and arrangement. The instructor may well have been the person who suggested that the student find a professional editor in the first place. Alternatively, the instructor may have suggested ample revision, and the student may have changed the text so much that new errors emerged. Also, ESL presents extra challenges in explaining grammar.
 
I also get the occasional request to review something written by a student who tunes out my feedback: s/he really wants a pat on the back rather than a review. The biggest problem, though, is that more than a few students have such a poor command of grammar to begin with that commenting on every error becomes almost impossible: with multiple errors per sentence, I have to judiciously select errors to focus on so the student doesn't become overwhelmed and give up. I also have to focus on content, arrangement, and design when I teach; teachers can't just be grammar police.
 
Before you blame the school systems that students came from, remember that English teachers have to deal with a number of cultural shifts in public schools. I spent one long, insane year teaching science in high school; I won't go into my own experiences, but ask any teacher in a less-than-affluent school district what he or she has to deal with. In addition to students writing for IM and not reading books for pleasure (or even newspapers for news), a number of other cultural pressures influence our youth. Current college students are products of the current culture, too. Making limited, incremental progress with students is better than making no progress.
 
Finally, I'll end my rant with this: I teach Intro to Technical Writing, but I've also taught composition. The grading load *is* massive, and most composition instructors focus on content, arrangement, and tone on early drafts: these comments are necessary to shape the revised work, and the average student stops reading comments if there are too many. 
 
Okay, back to commenting on student papers now.
________________________________________
Susan Youngblood
Ph.D. Student and Graduate Part-Time Instructor
Department of English
Texas Tech University
P.O. Box 43091
Lubbock, Texas 79409-3091

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