Providing feedback to students is one of the most challenging parts of a composition instructor’s job (Caswell; Straub, Practice), and making use of that feedback (whether provided by a professor, tutor, or classmate) is just as challenging for students.

While research has shown that students prefer feedback that helps them to revise some substantial part of their paper (Haswell; Lizzio and Wilson), they don’t always receive this kind of feedback—and even when they do, many students still tend to have a difficult time making revisions.

This chapter 1) helps students understand that having difficulty using and interpreting feedback is normal—that using
feedback successfully is actually a learned skill—and 2) presents recommendations students can tailor to their own contexts and goals.

Challenge 1: Seeing Writing Ability as an Unchangeable Character Trait

Many students see their writing ability as an inherent and unchangeable part of who they are. They feel that they are “good” at English or “bad” at English. Often these appraisals of their own writing skills come from earlier English classes that focus specifically on grammar.

This kind of thinking is what Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset,” which is when you “[believe] that your qualities are carved in stone” (6). If you think your writing ability is “carved in stone” or unchangeable, then what incentive is there for looking through your feedback?

Instead, we should have a “growth mindset” toward our abilities to write, a mindset that measures success by our ability to grow and isn’t steeped in fear of how many mistakes we make (Dweck 17). Essentially, if you understand that you’re not an inherently good or bad writer, but instead a writer who can improve, all of a sudden, the feedback you receive becomes a valuable tool.

Composition scholar Shirley Rose emphasizes this point: no matter who you are, “all writers always have more to learn about writing” (59). Even expert writers have to learn and grow as they adapt their writing for new audiences, purposes, and constraints. By seeing ourselves as ever-growing writers, we can embrace revision as an essential part of our learning process and acknowledge that we need practice to improve (Downs 66; Yancey 63). Feedback on our writing is essential
to that process.

Challenge 2: Deciphering Your Feedback

Once you understand that all writing is a process, and that all writers have more to learn, it becomes easier to see feedback not as critiques of failure but as powerful tools to help you improve as a writer.

Feedback should help you grow as a writer. But how exactly you’re supposed to grow can be ambiguous—if not totally confusing. It can be difficult to make sense of all the different comments you may get and what they are saying. Luckily, comments on writing tend to fall into some broad categories, and if you can figure out what kind of comment you have, then you can figure out what to do with it.

Forms of Feedback

Feedback on your writing assignments usually falls into one of three general categories:

• In-text or Marginal Comments
• End of Text Comments
• Rubric Scores

In-Text or Marginal Comments:

Found in the margins of your paper, this kind of feedback is typically brief and may focus on local or global issues. These comments often represent your readers experience as they moved through the text.

End of Text Comments

Found at the very beginning or end of the draft (or accompanying it), this kind of feedback is typically written as a letter to the author and tends to focus on global issues. These comments often represent a synthesis of the reader’s overall impressions of the text.

Rubric Scores

Found at the very beginning or end of the draft (or accompanying it), this kind of feedback evaluates how well you achieved the assignment criteria and tends to focus on global issues. These comments connect the text to larger course goals.

Content of Feedback

Sometimes feedback is confusing or overwhelming because we’re just not sure about its purpose. Thankfully, Summer Smith broke down the purposes of comments into three general categories: comments that judge some aspect of your writing, coach you on some aspect of your writing, and react to the paper. We should probably add an other category, comments that are too confusing or vague to decipher. Once you get a handle on the purpose of your comments, you can make better decisions about what to do with them.

Judgment

Judging comments are an assessment of how well you are doing a particular thing. That assessment can be positive (praise) or negative (criticism).

You may think of praise as a waste of time (“Just tell me what to do!”), but it is helpful for learning where your strengths lie—and intentionally replicating that success elsewhere. If you’ve got a negative judgment, or critique, you know there’s at least one thing you may want to revise. If the comment notes a confusing transition, that may encourage you to reconsider how your different ideas fit together.

Coaching Comments

Coaching comments offer suggestions. Research (Haswell; Lizzio and Wilson) tells us that students most prefer this feedback because it helps with making immediate changes to a paper.

Sometimes coaching comments are written indirectly, as questions. These questions may feel frustrating since they don’t usually come with instructions, but an important thing that questions do is keep you in charge of your writing. Lil Brannon and C. H. Knoblauch explain that students have a right to compose their work as they wish, so your reviewer is not presuming to know what to do best, but instead leaving that decision to you, the author (158).

Reacting Comments

Reacting comments explain your reviewer’s understanding of the paper or reactions to your writing.

When you encounter comments that explain the reader’s understanding of the paper, you may be inclined to shrug your shoulders and say, “Ok, whatever—moving on!” But don’t do it! These are some of the most helpful bits of feedback you can receive on your writing because they give you a window into your readers’ thoughts as they were reading. If the reader noted something they thought was unexpected, you can consider the impact you wanted your writing to have and whether it aligns with this reaction. If it’s not, you will need to revise accordingly.

Challenge 3: Deciding Whether You Have to or Should Take Recommendations in Your Feedback

Another set of challenges has to do with acting on the feedback you get.

Consider this scenario: You leave peer review with one partner saying that you did a great job on your thesis statement and the other partner telling you that your thesis statement could be clearer. What do you do?

Or this example: Your professor suggested that you consider reorganizing your paper and developing one of your main points further. That sounds hard—and you’re not so sure about developing that idea further. You didn’t think it was all that important to your paper. Do you have to make all those changes? Should you?

Underpinning the questions about these scenarios is an important fact: you are the author of your work, so you get to make the final call. No matter where your feedback comes from, you need to make your own decisions about what the best action is.

You don’t need to take all suggestions offered to you—especially if they run counter to your goals. Rather, you need to decide whether the suggestions align with what you want to accomplish. If it seems like your aims didn’t come through, that is what you should be revising—not advice based on misunderstanding your intentions, even if that feedback came
from your professor! Feedback with specific suggestions can be helpful, but you can’t simply follow a reviewer’s list of suggestions and be good to go.

Instead, you need to decide what the best plan is for your intentions in your paper. Rather than taking a suggestion at its word, use it to get a better understanding of how others saw your writing, which can tell you how successful you were. That is the kind of feedback you can do tons with.

Recommendations for Using Feedback

So now that we have a better understanding of common challenges with using feedback, let’s tackle how to use that feedback. The next time you get feedback on your writing, try out the following steps to help you figure out what to do and how to do it:

1. Set your own goals
2. Review the feedback
3. Acknowledge emotional responses
4. Develop follow-up questions
5. Act on your goals

Step 1: Set Your Own Goals

Before you even start working with your feedback, consider what you want to do with it. It may be tempting to just say, “Well, I just want to make my paper better,” but keep in mind that growth mindset concept from earlier. But focusing on the paper in question is a missed opportunity.

Students often confuse the revision set of the writing process as the part where the “fix the mistakes” in their essay. While it’s important to make improvements to the essay you’re working on, it’s even more important to think about how you can make your writing process more effective and efficient. Rather than thinking only about the paper in question, think about how you can improve as a writer in general. Understanding how to apply feedback to the general skills writers need (organizing ideas, using sources effectively, etc.), you can often save time on future projects by avoiding those mistakes.

Taking a moment to set your own goals is an example of the kind of metacognitive, reflective thinking that will help you transfer your learning to different writing situations.

A key part of setting your own goals is to, of course, review your paper. Take some time to read your draft (without any comments) to remind yourself of what you actually said and did. With your paper fresh in your mind you can then, as Sandra Giles recommends, consider what your intentions were with the paper (198).

• Were you trying to persuade, define, or analyze?
• How effective do you think you were?

You can also consider which parts of your essay you were most concerned about others reviewing and set a goal related to that. Keeping in mind that the type of paper you’re writing and the part of the semester you’re in should matter, goals might look like the following:

You could set many different goals for reviewing your feedback, but the most important thing is that the goals matter to you!

Step 2: Review the Feedback

We learned earlier that your feedback may come in many different forms, but no matter how your reviewer provided it, first make sure that you can find and access that feedback. If you don’t know how to access your feedback, contact your professor for help.

Once you’ve got the feedback in front of you, make sure that you go through all of it.

Start with any in-text comments. Because these are usually written in response to specific questions or observations the reader had as they were reading through your work, those comments tend to make the most sense if read in context with your paper, so be sure to read your writing around in-text comments.

After that, read your end note and rubric.

As you go through all that feedback, take notes and go slowly enough to give yourself time to think. If you have written feedback, consider reading it out loud (or just mouthing the feedback if you feel awkward about talking to yourself) to get yourself to slow down.

Take notes in whatever way works best for you. This could mean marking up your paper with your own comments, typing replies to the comments, writing on a separate sheet of paper, or whatever works for you. Mark any comments that you found confusing or you want to act on later.

Don’t just look at the critiques or negative comments. Be sure to keep a list of things your reviewer noted that you did well—knowing your strengths is just as powerful as knowing where you can improve. And keeping a list of strengths can help you see your growth, even when you feel like you aren’t making much progress.

Step 3: Acknowledge Emotional Responses

There is not a professional writer in existence who receives their editor’s comments and doesn‘t want to throw them across the room. Reacting emotionally to feedback on our writing is completely natural. But professional writers know that they need to give themselves some space to “cool off” and then eventually jump in and make their writing better.

Reviewing your feedback may elicit positive emotions, like feeling proud of yourself, but it can also elicit negative ones, like feeling misunderstood or discouraged. Dana Ferris found that previous experiences with writing in school, whether good or bad, were linked to students’ experiences with professor feedback (25). If you’ve gotten hurtful feedback before, it’s normal for that feedback to stick with you and color experiences with your current feedback.

Whatever you feel, acknowledge those emotions and note which bits of feedback elicited the strongest emotions. Take a moment to ask yourself why that comment had an impact on you and consider how you want to move forward.

Step 4: Act on Your Goals

Now comes the hardest part—acting on your goals!

This may feel overwhelming and challenging. After all, the same researchers who help us understand which comments students most prefer (Haswell; Lizzio and Wilson) also explain that students have a difficult time working with their
comments—you’re not alone in finding this step difficult!

However, Nancy Sommers, a composition researcher, explains that all revision is basically one of four specific actions:

• adding
• deleting
• replacing
• reorganizing

No matter how complex or challenging a revision might be, it will ultimately come down to deciding what you need to add, take out, replace with something else, or move around—not so bad.

That being said, Sommers also found that student writers tend to think about revision as just swapping out words and cleaning up errors, so they tended to mostly delete and replace small portions of their work, focusing mostly on local revisions (382). There is nothing wrong with making sure local revisions are taken care of, but when Sommers compared students to experienced writers (people who had written a lot before and wrote as part of their job), she found that the experienced writers used all four revision strategies and focused on big-picture (i.e., global) revisions (386).

Students who focus on the four revision strategies to make global revisions often have much better outcomes on their final text.

Use your feedback for guidance on the development of your ideas and how well your organization works.

• Are there any new ideas that you need to add or develop further?
• Any ideas or evidence that should be moved?

For example, you might look for places where you were offered feedback that shows the reviewer didn’t understand what you were trying to do—is there something you can add or clarify to get your intentions across more clearly? Perhaps you notice that several bits of feedback were about organizational changes—that might indicate you could work on reorganizing or restructuring your body paragraphs, a change that would impact a large chunk of the paper. Once you’ve worked on big-picture issues, return to those local issues. When you’re done revising, use your feedback as a means of checking over your work. Have you addressed all the concerns that you needed to?

Conclusion

While using feedback on your writing may seem like a pretty straightforward task, it’s actually hard to do well. It’s common to see writing skills as an inherent character trait rather than a skill to develop with time and practice, to have trouble deciphering your feedback, and to be unsure about what to do with your feedback. However, you can get a lot out of your feedback, whether that feedback comes from your instructor, a peer, a tutor, or someone else, with the following steps:

1. Setting your own goals
2. Reviewing the feedback
3. Acknowledging emotional responses
4. Developing follow-up questions
5. Acting on your goals

Taking these steps will help you to reflect more and improve on your work as a writer. Working with feedback doesn’t have to be an exercise in disappointment or confusion—instead it can be the most helpful and effective tool you have for developing as a writer.