Responding To a Draft: How to focus on process, not product

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When your task is not to grade a final revision but to work with a student on a draft, the key is to emphasize what a writer is doing rather than what he has not yet done. De-emphasizing product means doing more than evaluating a draft in comparison to some abstract notion of what a polished final draft should look like. Setting goals for the final product is, of course, necessary, but even more necessary is focusing on what the writer is currently doing to get there. In short, focusing on product and not process can too often set goals without providing the kind of assistance necessary to achieve those goals. In addition, such an approach blocks understanding what a writer is trying to do. Even beginning writers have conscious strategies that they employ; the task for an instructor is to work with the writer through the process. Here are some tips that may help:

Focus on ideas rather than grammar and mechanics

Early in the stages of the writing process, writers are more focused on working out ideas than they are in fine-tuning their prose. Thus, your comments should focus on developing and organizing ideas: discuss the demands of the assignment, examine the writer's response so far, and question what else the writer is interested in or planning on doing. In fact, your concern about sentence-level error, based on your reading of an early draft, will often be premature; you might be correcting a sentence that will never make it to the final draft anyway, or perhaps telling the student something she already knows but has not decided to attend to yet. If there is a pattern of particularly egregious error that is interfering with your comprehension, you might check to see if the student is aware of the problem; if not, you can remind her that it is something that will need work at a later point in the writing process.

Remember that a good thesis takes time

A common critique of early drafts is that they lack a focused thesis or main point. This absence is, however, pretty much inevitable. While a thesis statement generally appears in the introduction of a finished paper, a thesis concept doesn't come into focus until later in the writing process, until after a writer has thought through a wide range of ideas and options and wrestled with the necessary complexities. If a draft doesn't have a main point or sense of purpose, try to help the writer discover the implications of a her ideas in order to discern the thesis concept implicit in the draft. Keep in mind that tentative thesis statements often lurk about the conclusions of early drafts; it is often here that a writer--after the work of thinking through the draft so far--gets around to focusing some key ideas.

Recognize the difference between writer-based prose and reader-based prose

Much of the writing one does in the early stages of a draft is for oneself. Such "writer-based" prose is intended to aid a writer in the writing process, to help him move towards comprehension, clarity, and focus in his thinking and writing. Thus a lengthy summary of a source may be an attempt to work through some still-unclear ideas, or a series of repetitive sentences may represent an attempt to crystallize a key idea. Such prose is not intended for a reader, who would, rightly, find it belabored or repetitive. But it is important for the writer at this stage, and it is thus useful for an instructor to introduce this distinction to students, to accept such writer-based prose as a necessary part of good writing, and to characterize the writing process as, in a large part, the move from writer- to reader-based prose.

Normalize "error"

Drafting is often a messy business, and drafts are often disconcerting to instructors who find student drafts absent a thesis, randomly paragraphed, riddled with lapses in grammar and mechanics. Unfortunately, our students often pick up on our confusion; they tend, thus, to worry too much about "making mistakes" in drafts. Accepting the mess of a draft as a common part of the writing process is something both teachers and writers must do. As teachers, we should try to put our students at ease about the occasional chaos of drafting. In doing so, we should avoid characterizing early drafts in terms of error. Remember, in fact, that often the best writing is full of errors in early drafts; research has shown that a writer's commitment to original thought and stylistic experimentation generally leads to a higher degree of initial error. In fact, the most muddled prose often marks a writer's most ambitious attempt at original and complex thought. Avoid, then, the corrective response: "This essay is hopelessly muddled and has too many contradicting ideas in it." Instead offer a sympathetic and directive response: "I see that you still have very mixed feelings on this subject--that's inevitable when you take on a complicated subject. Is this what you want to finally say? Or, after some more thought, are some of these ideas finally more important to you than others?"

Provide students with the means to improve.

A comment like "This idea isn't clear enough" doesn't help a writer much. Adding to that comment "You need to add a concrete example" helps some, but even this comment still only addresses the work as product. Instead, try to aid a student's process, providing some constructive suggestion about what writers do to improve their work: "This idea would be clearer with a concrete example. Think about the evidence from your reading that led you to this generalization--that should provide with some specific detail."

If you get in the habit of thinking and responding this way to a student writer's work, you'll eventually be struck at how very different such a frame of mind is from that which we assume when we do graded evaluation of final drafts. Occasionally in conference a student will query my response to an ungraded draft and ask "What grade would this get if it were a final revision?" My answer is always the same: "I'm not even thinking in that way." Responding, then, to an ungraded draft involves more than simply withholding a grade; it requires instead an attention and a sympathy to the necessary process of writing that seeks to foster better writing by making better writers.