The Value of Feedback on Essays

Imagine your teacher is passing back graded essays to the class. Your paper is handed back face down and you hesitantly turn it over to reveal the grade. You find there is no grade on the front, however, there are many marks, circles, and writing in the margins. You continue on turning the pages just to find even more marks made all over your paper. You know the grade is going to be low, how can it not be with all the corrections? You arrive to the last page to find that you received an A-.

Would you be surprised with the grade? I was when I was handed an essay back for the first time in college. 

All the marks left on my final draft were there to use as tools for my next paper. They were written there by my teacher to help me develop my writing skills even further. The reason I was surprised by the good grade I received on the paper was because in high school, a lot of marks on my papers meant that you were lucky if you got a B.

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The difference in the feedback I received from my high school teachers to my college professors was a major change. My high school teachers would pick apart my essays to the bone with every grammatical and sentence structure error they could find, whereas my teacher in college focused more on the development of the ideas and the content in my essay. 

The marks on my paper were put there to allow me for further expansion on my writing skills.

Instead of the cross outs my high school teachers would put in my papers, the marks on my paper from college were there to help me broaden my mind even more on the ideas I developed. The type of feedback a Writing/English teacher provides on their students' essays can either help or harm their students when trying to write future essays.

The type of feedback I was receiving from my writing teachers in high school was not helping me understand why I was receiving lower grades. Freshmen year of high school was a rude awakening for me. I was placed in an honors English class because my good grades from middle school. We did not waste any time and jumped right into writing essays after every book we read. Essay after essay I got handed back was just another C. I would always think to myself, "What am I doing wrong and what can I do to fix it?" My teacher would have me stay after school with him so I can go over my essays. When I met with him after school, there was barely any conversation on the actual content of my essay.

All the advice I would get from him was to correct a word here or add a comma there. My teacher would always stress the importance of vocabulary, one area that I was not an expert in. My essays did not consist of fancy big words that looked and sounded intelligent. Instead, I was always straight to the point with my words, unlike my other classmates who seemed to know the whole dictionary.

Altering these minor errors in my essays never seemed to change the feedback I was receiving back on my essays. I was still receiving cross outs and minor grammar changes instead of comments about my content and ideas. The fact that I was receiving the same low grades over and over again proves that the problem was not my grammar but something else. The content and ideas in my essay were not given as much thought and attention as my grammar was given by my teachers when they were grading it.

With grammatical errors being the most common type of feedback I was receiving, I found that my thoughts and ideas did not seem to be the problem within my essays. This was extremely frustrating to me because I put a lot of thought and work into my essays. I could never seem to please my high school teachers enough to get a higher grade than a C. 

The lack of improvement in my freshmen year caused me to be placed in regular English for my sophomore and junior year. Because my teachers, until my junior year, could not see past the grammatical errors within my papers and put them before the content and thoughts in my essays, I became unmotivated to write. I accepted that I could not become a better writer because I was not getting better with time. This lack of motivation caused me to look at writing in a negative manner.

After getting back essay after essay with the same corrections on it, I stopped reading the suggestions from my high school teachers. I tried over and over to correct the grammatical errors throughout my papers and it was not getting better. Once I started improving on my grammar, then the lack of the vocabulary became a problem within my essays. I could not win with my high school teachers, so I gave up on pleasing them. I just wrote the best essays I could and handed them in, never reading them over again. This habit caused me to lose faith in my own writing making my writing classes quite miserable to be in.

Now that I am on the outside perspective of high school, I see that my teachers praised the students who wrote with big vocabulary words and an intelligent sounding style because it is easier to grade those type of essays than trying to understand the meaning of the essay itself. My essays were receiving low grades because my teachers were not looking for content and idea development as much as they were looking for a "good sounding" essay. A high school teacher can have more than two-hundred students, which means there would be two-hundred essays to grade. That would take hours beyond hours to read and grade each essay while looking for idea development and providing feedback to help strengthen the ideas, which is time high school teachers do not have.

When I took my first college English class I was surprised to find the grade difference from high school. Instead of focusing primarily on grammar mistakes, my professor looked at the development of ideas and content of my essays. My professor put the time into grasping what I had to say in my essays, not just mark them up and move on to the next paper as quick as they could like my high school teachers did. The feedback he left on my paper consisted of open ended questions that allowed for expansion on my ideas. This type of feedback helped broaden my mind when writing my essays. For example, on one essay I was writing about how students have become uninterested in finding the truth behind their essays. In one particular paragraph I was not clear about the position I put myself in when I was doing my research.

My teacher left a comment saying, “If you're trying to pretend to be a “typical” student would that student be questioning the sources as you do in this paragraph?" After reading the feedback from my professor, I was able to go back and clear up what I was trying to say, which made my paper easier to read. Continuing this process with the rest of the feedback like this written on my essay, the paper I handed in to grade was much clearer and got my point across more effectively to my readers.

After focusing so much on the kind of feedback I was getting from my high school and college teachers, I started to think about other factors that could the way students read and comprehend the feedback they are receiving on their papers.

The location of the feedback from a teacher can change the way a student writes his/her paper. After writing several papers for my writing professor in college, I found the most effective place for feedback was in the margins. By placing the comments in the margins, I was able to see exactly where questions were raised when my professor read my essay. I was also able to make corrections exactly where they needed to be. Just by my professor putting a question that he asked when reading my paper helped me understand what goes on in reader's minds when they read my paper. That way I could make my essay smoother to read.

Unlike marginal feedback, one the most ineffective types of feedback is over email. Having to look from the computer screen down to my paper and figuring out where my teacher raised a question in my paper made is difficult to make my paper clearer. Even though email can be used to a student's advantage in communicating with his/her instructor outside of school, without knowing the sentence or paragraph where specification is needed, the value of the feedback over email drastically declines.

Another effective form of feedback is an end note. However, I found that end notes are most effective if they are used along with marginal comments. The best place for an end note is on the last page of the paper where the instructor or peer puts their final thoughts on the paper as a whole. If an endnote is put at the bottom of any other page, then it becomes similar to feedback over an email because the student will not know where questions are raised by the readers. Concluding feedback with an end note helps the student fully grasp the feedback provided.

Just as I did in high school, other students can assume what teachers write on their essays is bad. In high school I stopped reading the feedback my teachers were writing on my essays because I would become angry with them. I felt that they were picking my essays down to the bone with the grammatical errors. I assumed that everything written by my teachers had no thought put into it and they just wrote down feedback and moved onto the next essay as soon as possible. 

This attitude towards teachers and writing essays can be avoided if the feedback provided on an essay is more than just cross outs. If a teacher puts the time into providing valuable feedback for the student, maybe not so many students would be turned away from writing and will develop an understanding with their teachers. Now that I am in college, I looked back on my high school years and saw that I should not have given up on reading the feedback my teachers were writing on my papers. Even though it was the same feedback over and over, I should have formed a habit of reading the feedback anyways to make myself a better writer in the long run.