Abstract
Written responses to student writing continue to play an important part in most composition classes despite increased employment of peers and tutors as sources of informed opinion and despite increasing emphasis on the importance of oral response. How best to respond to students' essays therefore concerns us all, at whatever level we teach. Yet valuable as we believe our penciled comments to be, this timeconsuming, difficult task proves too frequently a confused, unsatisfying experience for us; worse, our efforts prove too often apparently unhelpful to students who, if uninstructed, are alienated, antagonized, by our thought-heavy marginalia and terminal remarks. I suspect many of us, seated before a stack of papers, wonder over late-night coffee if we are doing this job well, if the results are worth the effort. Much of the research done on response remains buried in unpublished dissertations (for accounts of such research, see Jarabek and Dieterich, Knoblauch and Brannon 1981, Lamberg*), and the published material, scattered throughout the professional literature, is not readily available for comprehensive review. Compared to the growing body of literature devoted to other compositional and rhetorical topics, the amount of accessible advice on how to respond productively to student writing is scant. Nevertheless, enough such material of a practical nature exists to warrant attention. What follows is an attempt to summarize and to synthesize some of the guidelines for writing effective comments that this literature suggests, thereby supplementing C. W. Griffin's recent review-essay, which deals exclusively with the components of a theory of evaluation. To bring together and to group under general rubrics the eighty-one items here reviewed may assist the formation of a useful theory of response and may, more immediately, bring greater coherence and consistency to the almost daily act of commenting on student themes.