Student Essays Feedback

Sample #1

If I were working with this student in a tutoring session, I'd start with a brainstorm. We'd work together to look at the main points the writer used to address the prompt and work from there to create a more cohesive and better flowing essay.

After reading this week's material, it was definitely easier to notice moments in this writer's work that could be defined as "SLIPs." Lack of past tense when needed, such as "She pass my class..." shows that this student uses words and phrases as they sound in conversation. I would start by helping this student frame the audience of this assignment and help them realize the tone should be more polished and academically professional. We can go through their work together to find those "SLIP" moments and try raise awareness of them for future work.

One thing that I did with one of my tutees this week and that would be applicable here is to have two copies of this assignment for both the tutee and myself read through and make edits/changes. After we took a few minutes to do this, we look over the student's edits together, and only after doing this do I show them my own. I found that the pleasing result was that the student did indeed catch a lot of the errors the second time around, and some of the problems that I corrected in my version were corrected in the student's, though not always in exactly the same ways. Doing this helps me understand the ways the student writes and corrects a little better without imposing my own style preferences.

Sample #2

In working with this student, I would go back to the prompt first. Though the student tries to address their own performance in English, he doesn't say much about reading, and it's unclear whether he is speaking later about English as a subject or as an overall student. I would try to go through this passage to show the student where clarification might be needed and ways to avoid short, colloquial sentences.

One thing I did like about this writing that could be reframed and strengthened was the way the student attempted to create introductory and conclusion sentences. I might start with this point and try to create flow throughout the essay to elevate it to more academic language. The student gets tied up in places with punctuation and spelling, and those areas lack the most clarity for the reader. Focusing on making the message more coherent, we could work together to straighten those areas in hopes that the student will be able to avoid or edit out similar issues in the future.

This passage has a few separate grammar/spelling errors that repeat, and I might go through those with the student to make them aware of another potentially troublesome area they could look for in the future.

Sample #3

Like the other two students, I might work with this student by first outlining/brainstorming their main points and ideas that address the prompt. Something I might alert the student to is the importance of tone for this particular assignment. The teacher writing the letter might address the essay as a colleague would to another colleague, but it's not likely the two know each other, and a certain level of academic professionalism should be expressed. Knowing this, we could go through the essay and try to rephrase or reframe the strong points of the passage.

Expressing this writer's ideas in more formal language would necessitate intervention of the essay's run-on sentences and fragments. This seems to be how the writer's colloquialisms take shape in his writing, and I would work the student to try to use punctuation as an advantage.

To correct spelling and grammar errors, I would once again give the writer a chance to first correct their errors on their own. Then, I'd dive into the text with the writer to ask questions about specific words or phrases.

"Spelling" Essay

For this essay, I might first engage in conversation with the student to find out the true and main point of the paper. We would brainstorm about the unifying idea (whether it exists in the paper already or not), and from there, we could discuss more obvious ways to format an introduction, supporting paragraph(s) and conclusion. The student seems to discuss spelling and writing as well as overall performance as a student, but currently there is a disconnect between the two topics and nothing to show how they are related.

Some of the things that this week's reading touched on that appear in this essay include words that sound like two separate words but are really one, preposition usage and pronoun inferences. I would again frame the conversation in terms of making the writer's message as clear as possible and try to work on some mechanical issues that might benefit them in future writings as well.

I would be interested to see if a second draft from this student would still include many of the spelling, contraction and tense errors. I think a pattern that we could tackle through proofreading is the need for past tense in certain sentences.

"Weird Friday" Essay

Once again, this essay needs to start by going back to the prompt. I would try to converse with the student and get to what made that Friday "weird," and what part of this story documents a significant moment in their life. After a bit of brainstorming, we could begin to create a more cohesive narrative that stems from that one particular, significant moment.

As we said on the first day of class, the great thing about this story is the writer's authenticity. I would try to work with them to challenge that into a less colloquial and more formal type of paper. They definitely include the wordiness and some of the other patterns from the reading we did this week.

Something I might try with this student is to work one-on-one with them to brainstorm about a revised paper that incorporates the most important parts of this one. Once we have an outline or an idea of formatting for what the new paper would look like, only then would I go over errors with them or possible give them my suggested edits, knowing that they would be completely reworking those sentences/paragraphs anyway, so it would act as a guide or a tool for them in future compositions.