Everybody with a high school diploma knows the struggle of turning in a draft paper to the English teacher, and the next day receiving a paper with more scribbles and writing than a doctor’s note from a hypochondriac. These notes are meant to help us, but inevitably make us doubt our writing style, content, and meaning of existence. However we, and also our teachers, may have the wrong idea about revising and annotating.
Nancy Sommers’s journal article “Responding to Student Writing”, from The National Council of Teachers of English, discusses this issue in-depth, and by performing a pseudo-study and analyzing the comments teachers made on a particular paper, her group found that in fact the comments teachers make and their effect on the indecisive…