Each of you should have received an email with feedback notes for your draft literacy narratives. At the beginning of class I asked you to take about 10 minutes to read through this feedback, and to post two kinds of observations about it.
The first kinds of observations were about the form of the feedback. What stance to the comments take? What kind of tone or voice are they written in? What was the focus of the kinds of comments it offered? how did you feel about it?
The second kinds of observations were about what that feedback did, and how it "helped" you think about revising your essay.
Features of Elbow-style feedback.
In our discussion in class, you noted that the tone was "personal," like a not or a conversation, where you, the author, were addressed as a person. The comments were observations, statements of the reader's feelings and ideas - rather than judgments of the author's (your) work. You said you were "not being attacked or judged" => which is what teacher's comments often feel like. You noted that many of the comments asked questions or gave you something to think about (expanded on something you wrote), and that these comments pointed to particular places in the text. As best I could, I meant these comments to model Elbow's pointing, summarizing, and telling (I didn't do much of the showing, but some of my more abstract discussions might have approached that).
What you saw the comments on your literacy narratives as accomplishing
- pointing out the need for development (through asking questions, pointing to places of confusion)
- observing/suggesting patterns in your writing (summarizing what I got out of your writing/pointing to places I got it, telling what I thought it meant/showed)
- flippping or questioning conclusions (through telling about feelings + ideas in me as a reader)
- validation of your ideas for what you need to work on (through noticing that my response was similar to yours => so you have a good ground to move forward with your revising
The importance of getting in the habit of giving respectful, positive feedback. Before we got into a discussion of these comments, we talked about why bother learning to write feedback in this form. In your literacy narratives, one common theme was that school writing felt bad, and often the reason was connected to the relentless "suggestions" to make your writing more "correct" or better. Whether we mean to or not, many of us adopt the judgmental, faultfinding stance of our teachers when we work on revising our writing. This can make going back over a draft painful and unproductive.
By adopting the stance described by Elbow in Chapter 4, writers can talk to themselves about revising their writing in less harsh terms. We can question what is happening, wonder about how we respond and why, point to particularly effective or confusing places and be curious about what to do, and we can do this using a positive rather than a negative voice. This habit of seeing our work as something in progress that we are going to respond to in terms of what it does, rather than in terms of what is "wrong" with it - can make our relationships to writing more comfortable and positive.
After talking through the features of Elbow-style feedback, you spent the rest of class writing feedback for group-member's drafts.
Turning in + evaluation of peer feedback
We agreed that each of you would post a page (Titled "LNFeedback) to the Literacy narrative page. On that page you would write your Elbow-style feedback for each of the writers in your group. You will circulate feedback to the writers in your group through the approaches you decided on last week.
You will get credit/feedback on your comments to your classmate based on the form (needs to have the features listed in your book and above) and the content (needs to speak to the particular writing needs of the author you are writing to).
As you make your final revisions to your literacy narratives. . .
be sure to go back to the assignment sheet and re-read the criteria for the grade. In general as I reviewed your literacy narratives, I noticed that almost every writer had an overall focus (attention to how in particular they grew as a writer) but in most cases this focus needed 1) to be stated more directly, and 2) to be tied more closely to the stories used to develop it.
My notes on what to say to the class as a whole on how to work on their literacy narratives were:
1. work on the introduction => more direct statement of what you are going to say to the reader about your development as a writer. This should not be just a general statement; it should include some indication of what the stories show about how the supporting points fit within this overall generalization.
2. Keep working on illustrating/showing your points =>more stories
3. Make more direct, explicit connections between the stories and your overall focus = more reflections on what the stories show with respect to the focus=> to state how the story develops/connects to the overall focus (what point does it make).
Thank you for writing such fabulous drafts! They were a pleasure to read!
For next class:
Read: Introduction, Chapters 1 Elbow review; read Chapter 2
Write: 1) Post to your site the final literacy narrative, along with the rough draft & "Elbow-style" comments for your group.
2) observations about your writing process (the kind of reflective observations we worked on in class last week - but for writing projects/processes other than the literacy narrative) => you need enough material so that you can do the practice analysis in class on 2.25
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