Current scholarship indicates that most writing students read and make use of teachers’ written comments on their drafts and find some types of comments more helpful than others. But the research is unclear about which comments students find most useful and why. This article presents the results of a survey of 142 first- year college writing students’ perceptions about teacher comments on a writing sample. A 40-item questionnaire was used to investigate students’ reactions to three variables of teacher response: focus, specificity, and mode. The survey found that these college students seemed equally interested in getting responses on global matters of content, purpose, and organization as on local matters of sentence structure, wording, and correctness, but were wary of negative comments about ideas they had already expressed in their text. It also found that these students favored detailed commentary with specific and elaborated comments, but they did not like comments that sought to control their writing or that failed to provide helpful criticism for improving the writing. They most preferred comments that provided employed open questions, or included explanations that guided revision.

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It has become a commonplace in scholarship on teacher response: viewing comments as a between teacher and student, an ongoing discussion between the teacher reader and the student writer, a conversation. Erika Lindemann advises teachers to make comments that create a kind of dialogue between teacher and student and keep the lines of communication open (216). Chris Anson encourages teachers to write comments that are more casual than formal, as if rhetorically sitting next to the writer, collaborating, suggesting,