Nancy I. Sommers

This slim volume (just about 50 pages), which I use in the Advanced Composition course I teach for pre-service English/Language Arts teachers, is a concentrated and highly practical guide for novice teachers and experienced teachers alike. Sommers clearly explains how and why feedback on drafts matters, and she stresses both effective pedagogy and the affective impact of teachers’ comments on students’ attitudes toward writing. Her approach is geared toward formative evaluation and its role as an instructional strategy, and she adopts a less-is-more mentality, urging teachers to focus their response on higher order elements of composition rather than editing and proofreading.

Sommers’ theories on teaching writing are compatible with Constance Weaver’s theories on teaching grammar “an inch wide and a mile deep”—focus on one or two selected skills within each assignment to build and develop each student’s proficiency rather than trying to address every “error” in the writing. She also includes samples of her own responses to drafts and a handy graphic listing Best Practices for responding to student writing. My students and I have found this guide to be extremely useful.… (mere)