What were the least effective and most effective responses you ever had to your writing, and why?
Cecelia Webster (College Writing Programs)
When I began attending Berkeley, the comment “Awk” “Awk” “Awk” plagued the margins of my papers, like a predatory bird screeching at my sentences. That sentences were clunking through my papers embarrassed me. A diligent undergraduate, I bravely took them to office hours. However, no professor or graduate student could tell me what was wrong. They said, “Well, we just wouldn’t say it that way.” I’d already figured that out. But this response gave me the feeling that there was a “we” who knew how to say things in English, and an “I” who didn’t. Without that innate knowledge of “how we say things,” I concluded I wasn’t part of the academic writing elite.
The most helpful comment on my writing came from a literature professor during a conference in my first semester as a graduate student. She was going over a few pages of my paper on Gothic novels. I was trying desperately to sound erudite and brilliant and impress her (she was very, very smart), and was frustrated that I couldn’t communicate what were (of course) convoluted and disjointed thoughts. She said, “I can’t follow your thinking here. You’re abandoning me in this writing. Look, I’ve read these books. And I’ve read most of the scholarship on these books. I want to read something different. You have something to say that I haven’t heard before. I know you do. Pretend you’re walking me through this text. You’ve got my hand. We’re going somewhere together and I don’t want you to lose me. You’re leading me through what you see as we go. You’re saying, ‘Look, do you see that tree. This is what I see when I see that tree. This is why this tree is important.’ And then I can see what you see the way that you see it.” She paused. “You get to write about what you want to write about.”
Until that point, I was reaching to write about what I thought scholars wrote about. That academic writing reflected how I thought about something, and that my real task was to convey this thinking process to another person, had never occurred to me. Of course, writing was still difficult but I had found its source.
Arne Lunde (Department of Scandinavian)
The most helpful response I’ve ever received to my writing was in the 9th grade. I was an introverted baseball freak at a new school, and the only thing I cared to write about in my English class was major league baseball. Realizing I was not about to change topics any time soon, my savvy teacher, Mr. Nash, handed me his paperback copy of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 baseball novel The Natural and suggested I read it on my own sometime. That book got me hooked on American literature and soon Poe, Twain, and Faulkner in class seemed cool too.
Effective writers are also curious readers, and the loan of a great book was the best response to my writing at that stage I could have received. Most of my humanities teachers have been extremely dedicated, so it’s hard to think of many truly unhelpful responses. I’ve encountered the occasional teacher who gives virtually no feedback to a long paper beyond a “Nice work” empty compliment or one who wants you to revise everything to blindly fit some preconceived formula of theirs, but fortunately, they’re the exceptions.
Mercedes Ignacio (Sociology/Public Policy)
Although many of my classmates found their writing tutors very helpful, my tutor gave the least helpful response that I have received to my writing. She didn’t like any of my ideas, but told me what ideas she herself had for the paper: she basically rewrote my paper for me. Being an unconfident reader at the time, I changed my paper. I assumed that she knew what was best since she was the tutor. When my instructor returned the paper to me she expressed how disappointed she was that I had changed everything. I went back to my original ideas and got rid of the tutor.
My college writing instructor gave the most helpful response. She would always go over the strong and weak points of our papers, but she made it clear that we didn’t have to take any of her suggestions. Instead, she helped trigger and enhance our own ideas. Specifically, I remember one time when I was attempting to describe the appearance of my grandmother’s house, and she asked me to describe what was on the walls. Unknowingly, she had reminded me of a picture that became an essential element to the theme of my paper.
Originally Published: Volume 2 – Number 1 (Spring 2001)