乐播传媒

Questions? Comments?

Perhaps it was in ancient Egypt when a teacher first jotted 鈥渁wkward鈥� and 鈥渓acks coherence鈥� on a sheet of papyrus, sending a student on a long, sad walk along the Nile. Ever since, professors鈥� comments on student papers have carried real power.

At a recent campus, professors and writing professionals from a number of liberal arts colleges discussed how writing assignments, including the practice of commenting on student papers, create conversations that make a student feel connected to college.

(But not always. One student presenter at the gathering recalled the stark feedback on her very first 乐播传媒 paper. 鈥淚 felt I had already failed,鈥� she said, adding that professors can do a better job explaining their disciplines鈥� writing styles.)

At 乐播传媒, professors tend to accept hard copies of papers and make comments by hand, says Director of Writing Hillory Oakes. She鈥檚 encouraging professors to accept papers electronically and make their comments electronically, a practice she admits is 鈥渓ess common at 乐播传媒 than at comparable schools,鈥� though she doesn鈥檛 know why.

E-commenting, she adds, 鈥渇osters a sense of conversation between the student-writer and the faculty-reader that crammed handwriting scribbled in a margin can鈥檛,鈥� she says.

Meanwhile, the an English professor at George Washington who writes the blog 鈥淯niversity Diaries鈥�. Handwritten comments 鈥渃onfirm the authenticity鈥� of a professor鈥檚 presence in a student鈥檚 life. 鈥淭his professor and no other…did the student the honor of reading, thinking about, and writing directly to the student, in the professor鈥檚 own ink, in the professor鈥檚 personal scrawl, on the student鈥檚 own paper.鈥�

When a student submits a paper, it feels like an offering to the gods. And when the clouds part for the sun, you feel it forever. The poet Pamela Alexander 鈥�70 will always remember this comment from the late Werner Deiman: 鈥淭his paper coruscates.鈥� (Look it up; she and I had to.)

A friend remembers a professor charitably expressing how he saw evidence of promise in a sequence of papers that otherwise regressed. 鈥淗e could have justifiably blown me away with a single sentence but instead he chose kindness,鈥� said my friend.

I arrived in college armed with the literary equivalent of a musket and black powder. I wrote with some power, a style partly picked up from Boston Globe sportswriters like Ray Fitzgerald, and my aim was sometimes off. I鈥檇 write about Hedda Gabler like a Globe columnist, humping one note and stuffing random metaphors throughout the paper like toys plucked from a crane game in the vestibule of Wal-Mart.

The nadir, or zenith, was using a Buffalo Springfield lyric to define solipsism for a Victorian novel class (or was it Romantic poetry?): 鈥淢y head was the event of the season.鈥� Over time, professors鈥� comments helped me calibrate my writing style.

Handwritten comments aren鈥檛 for everyone. Sociology professor Sawyer Sylvester makes extensive editing marks on papers but eschews long written comments because 鈥渕y handwriting is atrocious. For the student, it would be an exercise in translation,鈥� he says. 鈥淚nstead, I鈥檒l ask them to come to my office to talk about the paper.鈥�

How old-school.

H. Jay Burns, Editor