Sommers student composition

The style of teacher’s comments on student’s literary works is very vague and in fact, often times, alters the purpose of the writer. The writer goes from wanting to express his/ her own thoughts to wanting to follow the style and guidelines of the professor.  Sommers intends to help teachers improve their comments on student essays and written works. This will help students be able to revise their papers better instead of just "patching up” their writing. The author uses two examples of some written teacher comments of student essays to demonstrate how little specific teachers are when they revise student papers. The author points out comments like “awkward” and “word choice” on the paper to emphasize her point. Sommers mentions, how can a student effectively revise their paper when teachers provide little detail to their comments and contradict themselves.

The author concludes that just how teachers always tell students to be more specific while writing they should also be more specific themselves and try to help the student develop their writing ideas instead of trying to make them do what they want.

Comments help writers understand what they cannot see by editing a paper themselves. It helps give a different point of view and understand how he/she can revise it for the audience to be able to understand. Generic comments are not useful in essays because it sends a message that makes the student think that all they have to do is edit the paper instead of develop their ideas. I agree with the authors point of view because as a student I have often been confused with teachers comments on my papers, I think students would write better papers if professors also included betters comments.