My six years as a composition instructor have seen dramatic changes in the way I look at student texts. As a TA from 1981 to 1983, I ruthlessly scrutinized in-class essays for weaknesses in the "Big Six": thesis, organization, development, technical control, style, and insight. I spent in the range of twenty to forty minutes per paper, circling or underscoring every problem I could find and then composing both marginal and summary comments substantial enough to highlight those errors and to justify the grade. The virtue of this way of grading was its thoroughness. My students often commented that I didn't miss a thing, and I took pride in being able to agree with them. In the fall of 1983, 1 began to read some of the scholarship in the field, something I consider alarming even now since I had taught two full years at S.U. and had made little effort to understand my teacherly practices. One of the lessons my reading taught me concerned the wastefulness of lengthy comments on final drafts of papers, so I reacted the only way I could in a product-oriented program: I deliberately reduced the number and length of comments on student texts, allowing just enough to inform students of major problems and at the same time assure future file-reviewers that I hadn't lost my touch. Since then I have become more aware of the composing process and its necessary impact on the writing I assign and the way I respond to it. While I still feel some pressure to make papers "bleed"--despite having long since disposed of my trusty red pen--I now fix my thinking on the contexts within which students write for me and, as a result, respond to student drafts in an entirely different fashion.

Evaluating student papers derives much of its power to vex and intimidate, I believe, from our own confusions about composition. I recall blaming myself or my students for the problems that continually crept into their essays. Either I didn't teach them well enough, or they didn't pay much heed to my instruction. What a horrible reduction of composition that was! I have discovered since then just how significant the contexts and circumstances of writing assignments are to the ultimate successes or failures those assignments meet. This discovery, combined with a new way of looking at my students, is primarily responsible for the changes that have taken place in my evaluation practices over the years.

Worth noting is the fact that I regard all of my students as writers, some more experienced and impressive then others, I'll grant you, but writers nonetheless. Thus, I immediately acknowledge the range of difficulties we all face when putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), and a peculiar combination of empathy and knowledge of the composing process guides my responses to student texts. What this means in practice is that all in-class writing (the ilk this department has long required, anyway) constitutes "dummy runs," preliminary drafts which should not be evaluated in the same way a final draft would be evaluated. In fact, graded in-class essays need not be a part of our courses at all. Yes, I do appreciate the value of writing under pressure on predetermined topics, but let's not translate the value of that practice into a mandate to grade such drafts. Instead of adopting that traditional evaluative response at this stage, we should focus on being good readers of student texts, helping students to understand and to define, perhaps redefine, their intentions as writers. Our focus should move away from what Janet Emig calls the "accidents of discourse"--spelling, punctuation, penmanship, and length--toward the "essence of discourse,"--thematic development, rhetorical and thematic sophistication, and fulfillment of intent--at least until we see later drafts. As problems surface in student writers' texts, we should attempt to understand them rather than simply label them.

A second consideration affecting my evaluation of student texts, which correlates with what I describe in the preceding paragraph, is my acknowledgment of writing as a heuristic activity. Writing helps writers to clarify ideas and also to invent "new" ones. I have already clarified the implications of this notion for evaluating in-class writing, but second and third drafts of student papers also demand our re-seeing them in many cases. Take, for example, the student who continues to write plot summary rather than critical analysis of a complicated short story you assigned. Your response
might be to lose patience, thinking the student simply ignored your instructions, and then to fail this particular paper, warning the student not to depend on plot summary in his or her next essay. (It's because I used to respond this way that I offer this example.) The fact might be, however, that this student is still grappling with the content of the story, that he or she is still unsure about how to read the text. As a result, the paper submitted to you for evaluation is actually a discovery draft which is by no means ready to be graded. What this student needs is to confer with you about the value of this draft as a heuristic and then to revise the paper with a clearer purpose in mind. Understanding that some students require more time to work through the process of composing in situations like this one inevitably prompts us to be a bit more tolerant of their writing problems, lots more flexible with due dates for papers, and considerably less defensive of our teaching as well.

In my Studio I course last semester, I confronted the problems of "unfinished" texts over and over again. (Granted, no text is ever "finished," but papers need to be submitted for review somewhere along the line). Many of the texts my students submitted required two or three more revisions before I could evaluate them in good conscience. Thus, about four weeks into the semester, I trashed my original syllabus, which required eleven papers and thus afforded no time to rework them significantly, and reduced the number of graded papers to five so that the entire class could work through multiple drafts. We often started these papers in class, generating what I call "zero drafts," papers that evolve from nothing, and then shared these preliminary texts aloud. After reacting to each others' initial efforts, the students would prepare more formalized drafts to share in a workshop with their peers. During these workshops, my students were instructed to consider high-level, rhetorical concerns of discourse as they read each others' papers: the text's clear sense of audience and purpose, its choice of an effective persona, and its use of an effective organization to convey central and subordinate ideas. After these workshops, each student submitted his or her draft, along with the peer feedback received during workshop, to me for further comment. Within two or three class periods, I returned drafts full of readerly responses and instructed students to revise once again. In most cases, it was this third draft which earned a grade. It was from these drafts that I expected correctness as well as effective organization and generally impressive writing. In cases where more drafts seemed in order, however, I would withhold my evaluation until more revision took place, usually within a week or two. I discovered that working with drafts over such a long period of time and responding to them on different levels with each draft revealed much more to me about my students' abilities to compose effectively than any system or method I had used previously.

So, here you have it, my current notions about evaluation. While I'm happy to share what I did and what I'm thinking as I evaluate student texts, however, I'm well aware that tomorrow my ideas might be radically different. That's one of the realities of teaching, though, I've discovered. Each day in the classroom and each article read prompts us to re-see everything we do.