When I was a student, I was taught to take notes when researching by summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting on note cards. Although this process was often tiresome and time-consuming, it did force me to read and, hopefully, process the information that would eventually end up in my essay.

I think maybe that phase in writing in which students allot time to actually take notes on their sources—to, in a sense, “process” and internalize their research—is being lost as students increasingly access their sources from online sites and “cut and paste” together the first draft of their essay.

Now, I’m not advocating a return to taking notes on note cards—a practice I began to abandon even before I was finished with my graduate studies years ago. Although I think it is a form of note taking that still may work for some, the ease with which students can take notes on their computers means that the 3 x 5 note card may well be on its way out as a research method.

What I am advocating, however, is that we as writing instructors (and I don’t only mean English teachers!) talk much more explicitly about the importance of note taking (or, as some texts now call it, “information gathering”) in the writing process. I think this is important because so many students skip this phase and try to write an essay without having completed the research they need to produce a substantive and thoughtful essay. We’ve all read these kinds of essays—slapdash, lacking in depth or analysis, a patch quilt of different sources that don’t go anywhere.

Teaching note taking skills
Here’s how I address the issue with my students. In some of my early assignments, I apportion a whole class or part of a class to simply having students take notes on their sources, which I ask them to bring to class. Of course, you might, as I do, have Internet access in your classroom, but it’s better if you ask the students to print out one or two of their sources beforehand. I recommend letting students take notes for maybe a half hour or forty-five minutes at a stretch. Then, five or ten minutes before the end of class, talk to students about what they have just done.

We need to remember that at least some of these students are now, as freshmen, just discovering how to take notes on sources. Talking about note taking and even devoting class time to practicing this important skill is every bit as important as all the other skills students need to write a college-level essay. Although many writing texts now have sections describing the various ways students can take notes on sources, how many of us are actually teaching or modeling these techniques to students, as opposed to assuming that they are already employing them?

Matt Birkenhauer teaches English at Northern Kentucky University.

The idea that developmental writers who make errors are doing so in an attempt to “get it right” was first put forth in a ground-breaking study by Mina Shaughnessy called Errors and Expectations, which came out in 1977. In the book, Shaugnessy argued that composition teachers ought to view errors made by “basic writers” (as they were then called) in a more positive light, since these errors occur as the writers try to incorporate improperly internalized “rules” that they believe are standard. Now, since many developmental writers often haven’t had the exposure to print that more sophisticated writers have had, they frequently aren’t as facile with these conventions that our more experienced student writers take for granted.

To understand this idea, think of a child trying to get the verb system in English right. She regularizes all regular verbs—forming the past tense by adding ed to them. When, however, she tries this with the irregular verb “swum,” she gets “swimmed,” which seems perfectly logical to her—and it is, according to the system of regular verbs she is trying to master. As she reads and speaks and becomes more familiar with English, she’ll realize that there are exceptions (called irregular verbs) to the regular verb system.

Years ago when I was working in a writing center, I was reading a paper by a student who probably wasn’t a developmental writer. She was writing a philosophy paper for a professor and, as far as I could tell, she was on target in most of her arguments. In other words, content wasn’t the problem in her paper—in fact, not much was wrong with her paper. However, I discovered a few things she might want to address, including several past participles that had the ed left off of them. I mentioned this in passing, assuming it was basically a “typo” in longhand (yes, it was that long ago!).

After I pointed out a few things she could change, and gave her a chance to try to try her hand at them, she was still apprehensive: She’d heard this professor was a stickler for grammar, and she wondered whether the paper was in the “right tense.” Then it hit me why her past participles were missing their past tense markers: In her earnestness to avoid switching tense (most of the paper was written in the present tense), she was even dropping the past tense marker from non-finite verbs (or verbals, more accurately), out of concern. Here she was making errors with the best of intentions!

David Bartholomae, in “The Study of Error,” asks us as developmental writing teachers to put into error analysis the same hermeneutic ingenuity we put into deciphering literature:

The teacher who is unable to make sense out of a seemingly bizarre piece of student writing is often the same teacher who can give an elaborate explanation of the “meaning” of a story by Donald Barthelme or a poem by E.E. Cummings. If we learn to treat the language of basic writing as language and assume, as we often do when writers violate our expectations in more conventional ways, that the unconventional features in their writing are evidence of intention and that they are, therefore, meaningful, then we can chart systematic choices, individual strategies, and characteristic processes of thought.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that many errors are made with the best of intentions, as students—not as familiar with the conventions of written prose as many of our more proficient writers are—try to apply what they think are “rules.” Perhaps we should try approaching student error in teaching developmental writing more as a Northrop Frye, than as a Mrs. Grundy.

Matt Birkenhauer teaches English at Northern Kentucky University. This article first appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Kentucky Association for Developmental Education newsletter.

Fortunately, over the years I’ve developed a system where I grade student papers the same way I encourage students to write—that is, I’ve incorporated a process approach to grading student essays.

Taking a dip into student writing
The process starts with something I call “dipping.” I “dip” by going through a batch of student essays to make sure everything is in order. For example, for all submitted essays I require a grading rubric, a rough draft, and a final draft. (For papers using sources, I also require a Works Cited page.) So—while watching TV at night or sitting in my home office as my kids play elsewhere—I’ll “dip.” In addition to making sure that everything is in order, dipping also allows me to skim the first page or so of the essay.

The next step in my process involves the use of sticky notes, usually of the 4-by-6-inch size. At this stage I read through the entire essay and then comment on its strengths and weaknesses. On one sticky note, for a Personal Experience essay, I wrote: “Though Ashley sometimes uses more words than she needs to, she tells a pretty good story, with suspense and buildup. The weakest part for me was the conclusion. What could she do to improve this?” Obviously, I’m not completely certain of my full response here, but that’s OK; I don’t have to be at this point. That’s a benefit of approaching grading as a process.

The advantage of sticky notes is that their very size encourages me to be concise. In addition to my sticky note comments, I also “mark” papers in this stage of the process, in the sense of pointing out sentence boundary and other problems; but I don’t heavily edit the essays, since the research from the last 30 years makes clear that bleeding all over a student’s essay isn’t all that useful.

A more reflective grading process
In the last stage of this process, I comment directly on the student’s grading rubric; that is, I transform my sticky-note “writer-based” comments into the reader-based comments the student sees. Because I use grading rubrics, I needn’t reprise everything that is wrong with a particular essay and can distill from my sticky-note comments what is most germane to a student’s revising his or her essay. With the high A essays, I generally just give a verbal pat on the back. With essays in the B range and below, I comment more, though usually no more than a brief paragraph. My comments also include underlined or asterisked parts of the grading rubric, sometimes with brief comments in the margin.

Although this process approach may seem more work, it’s really not. But it is fairer to the student. If you have only one shot to respond—that is, if you try to grade a batch of papers in essentially a single sitting—are you giving a truly reflective response? This is particularly a problem for those essays that when first read make us scratch our heads. But if you give yourself two or three times to ruminate over such an essay, your response is likely to be more helpful because you’re being more thoughtful.

Excerpted from Incorporating Process Pedagogy into Grading Student Essays, The Teaching Professor, May 2008.

Matt Birkenhauer teaches English at Northern Kentucky University.