week 7 articles

I'm glad I decided to write this post today opposed to anytime prior because last night, a friend of mine asked me to review a paper for him. I can't even remember the last time I really reviewed someone else's essay for a class I'm not in or haven't taken. We spend a lot of time in this course discussing the editing and revising components of the writing process and every week we review drafts written by other classmates. I think we sometime fail to keep in mind the big role context plays in the consultation process. We have all read the same articles prior to reviewing the paper drafts on those articles and we have all read the same text prior to class discussion on those readings. Therefore, we may subconsciously fill in the blanks that would ordinarily confuse an outsider. 

Richard Straub's article, "The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of 'Directive' and 'Facilitative' Commentary" correlates with Summer Smith's article, "The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing". Both of these articles criticize the role and effect that teacher's comments on a paper have in regard to the writer then making changes on their work. As I earlier mentioned, last night I was asked by a friend to review an essay for a class of his in a subject that I know nothing about. After spending way too much time on the first paragraph, I found myself pausing for a second then erasing everything I had written. I had realized that I was marking his words wrong and suggesting language that, in reality, is not how the paper should have been written, but rather, the style and tone I would have used to write the paper. I put my pencil down, reread the paper all at once, and realized his ideas were indeed very strong. I got a clear idea of his argument and main points having not even been given the prompt. But that said, his organization, sentence structure, tone, voice, and word choice definitely needed some time and effort. So along the margins of certain sections, I suggested areas he could be more concise and areas where ideas did not exactly connect understandably. Then at the end, I noted that he should pay attention to the grammar, sentence structure, verb tense, and all that other stuff. 

This experience gave me a connection to both of the articles because I found myself (after a real life application) disagreeing with the overall arguments made by both Smith and Straub. I did not write comments on my friend's paper because I "had to", I wrote them because as a reader, I found myself confused at parts and I was offering him feedback. Writing will never been definite--everything from word choice to ideas is of the author's personal choice. Thus, I think feedback can never hurt because in the end, it's once again the writer's choice on how they wish to apply that feedback to their writing.