Humanities Brown Bag Seminar

What do students actually do with professors' comments on their writing? What kinds of comments are most likely to engage and energize student writers and which confuse or demoralize them? How might faculty spend less time writing comments on essays while achieving better outcomes? While there has been extensive qualitative and quantitative research in the field of Rhetoric and Composition on these questions, findings too rarely reach our colleagues in other fields, many of whom spend a significant amount of their time responding to student writing. This presentation will share a digested version of findings relevant to the work of faculty teaching with writing in humanities and social science courses. It will offer practical guidelines for writing effective feedback on student writing, as well as models of varied feedback approaches. There will also be time to have a conversation about our current practices and the specific challenges of giving effective feedback on writing at Caltech.