feedback

I’m very careful to cover my ass. If I’m giving a student a low grade, I make sure I’ve pointed out why. I don’t want them coming back and I’m unable to point out specifically why I gave them a C.

— Writing instructor

I will make sure in the future that I am careful and back up my arguments with good facts.

—Student writer, Spring 2001

“[T]echnical things have political qualities. [. . . M]achines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and productivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority.”

— Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

Developing Authority in Student Writing through Written Peer Critique in the Disciplines

Students come to university as “strangers” to the academic conversation (Maimon, 1979); however, there is no one-style-fits-all discourse that students can learn and use successfully in all their classes. Each discipline has its own set of conventions in which particular ways of constructing and communicating knowledge are embedded.

Re-reading and reflecting on an essay published 27 years ago was a startling experience. With nothing but hindsight, I experienced surprise and a concern that my tone sounded too assured (those essays that I quoted didn’t sound nearly as weak as I made them out to be). A lot has changed since “Students as Readers of Their Classmates’ Writing: Some Implications for Peer Critiquing” was published in 1984. What about gender? race? class? ethnicity? transnationalism?