Writers Need Feedback To Help A Better Article

By Author: Amandda
Total Articles: 60
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This is more than just the truism that writers need feedback. The best writing, like all learning, only happens through a constant and disciplined escape of self to explore the consequences. This draft horror story was meant to be scary; is it? This description was meant to be vivid enough for you Cartier Replica to picture the person; can you? This resume and cover letter was meant to get me a job. Would it impress a skeptical human resources person? Our boundless egocentrism demands that we learn how to distinguish effort from result.

Consider, for example, what this middle school teacher does to teach his charges that feed-back in light of Purpose and Audience is key. He has developed an exquisite process for helping students get the feedback they need to escape egocentrism and to keep pondering purpose and audience. Long before he reads student drafts, the young writers have to engage in the following self-assessment and peer review process as part of clarifying purpose and audience:

1. Writer provides a draft of the paper to his or her peer review team. ...
... Attached to the draft is a purpose/audience statement: Here was my aim and here is who I was writing for (e.g., "A story meant to be scary, for my peers").

2. Peer reviewers give feedback only in terms of Purpose and Audience: "Here is where it was most scary and interesting to me; here is where wasn't scary at all (and why)."
3. Peer reviewers mark with an x the places in the paper where they lost interest in reading and explain why.
4. Writer ponders the group's comments, revises the paper, and submits it o the teacher.

Attached is a statement of which feedback was taken and why, which wasn't and why not, and an overall self-assessment of the revised draft.

While this is a powerful process, note that peer review is still sometimes insufficient since it is a proxy for real feedback. So: Would anyone in a bookstore keep reading—as opposed to peers forced to read in class? Would the author be able to achieve similar and different purposes with a variety of real-world audiences, including (especially) indifferent or skeptical audiences?
The good news is that adolescents want to make a difference, and writing is one of the few ways to do so in the otherwise predictable place called school. When researchers for the National Commission on Writing interviewed high school students, they found
A key theme in what teens said motivated them to write was one of "relevance." Teens said, in varying ways, that they wanted to Cartier Replica Watches be doing things that mattered socially, in their own lives, and had an impact. . . . They said, in effect, that if they were going to spend time and energy doing schoolwork, they wanted it to be something that related specifically to them and their interests. Teens also found it motivating when their writing could have broader impact through being publicly shared in class, in person, in print, or on the Internet. In fact, many teens commented on the positive push publishing or presenting to a formal audience provided for their writing.