Response to "Exclusively Positive Response to Student Writing" by Frances Zak

         I was so pleased to read this article because it provided some much needed information about what I have believed for many years: that it's not necessary to correct "errors" in student writing. I've long believed that students that positive reinforcement and response is all that's necessary to facilitate an improvement in student writing.  Or rather, students should learn to correct their own writing through an ongoing process of revision. I feel that the best way to get students to improve their own writing, at least initially, is to get them to increase their output and to reflect critically on their own work.  Critical reflection will drive them into attempts to clarify and refine the content of their work which can lead to fewer mechanical errors in and of itself.

     I also think that positive feedback confers upon the students a much needed boost in confidence and the feeling that the stories they have to tell are meaningful and worthy of being told and heard.  If someone believes that their story isn’t worth telling, how hard are they going to work to tell it properly? If we can, we should instill in students who have been underserved the idea that underserved doesn’t equal unimportant and that if no one listened before, we’re ready to listen now.

     Frances Zak notes in her article that students that receive traditional responses to their writing improve as much as do students who receive purely positive feedback.  The difference seems to be that students who don’t have their mechanical errors corrected have improved without the intervention of the instructor.  We can infer from this information that through the process of clarifying meaning, students will be able to reduce mechanical errors on their own.  It can be really difficult to look at a paper full of errors and not correct them; however, what’s important about the writing is the story not the punctuation.  A well written story is organized, has a sense of chronology, uses a variety of descriptive language and rhetorical techniques and uses dialogue among many other things.  Our focus should be on these high order concerns and not on commas.