Caceres 1 Marie Caceres Professor Jan Reiman ENGL-1102 February 13, 2012

Reading Response Sheet for Nancy Sommers Responding to Student Writing. 1. Whats your experience with peer workshop been like? Where have you done it, how was it conducted? How did you feel about it? Peer workshop to me has been really helpful to me. Sometimes it feels good to have both your peers and your teacher there with feedback. Sometimes students feel most professors dont understand their work due to these types of things: culture, age, and environments. With other students there, that barrier is broken. They bring insight and ideas to your writing you would have never thought about doing. 2. What does Somers claim in her argument that resonates with you? Offer direct quotes from the article to support your point. She agrees with helping the student IN the process of writing the paper rather then waiting till it is a full product. She says Comments create the motive for doing something different in the next draft; thoughtful comments create the motive for revising. Without comments from their teachers or from their peers, student writers will revise in a consistently narrow and predictable way . Shes right! Its something that pushes us to have a better product in the end! When the teacher appropriates the text for the student in this way, students are encouraged to see their writing as a series of parts-words, sentences, paragraphs- and not as a whole discourse. I considered myself to be one of these people before I entered college. Those who would just sit at a desk, do what they were told. Right the paper EXACTLY how the professor wanted it, and in the end, got nothing out of it. Sommers is trying to bring up a fact that has been disputed for decades! The average paper should deserve, well you guessed it, an average reply. So breaking the paper into its words, and misspellings, doesnt help the writer. Those are things that can be polished last. Sommers is basically stating most teachers are just lazy. They feel they could give the same cookie-cutter answer and make everything okay. That

Caceres 2 COULD work from time to time, but it fails when it comes to the minds of those who actually want to learn and immerse themselves in discourse. This uniform code of commands, requests, and pleadings demonstrates that the teacher holds a license for vagueness while the student is commanded to be specific. Sommers has good evidence, however I can definitely say she cannot classify all teachers as this. Theyre human, not all the same type robots.

3. In light of the two previous questions, develop some guidelines for what you hope will happen in peer workshop experiences in the class. Be an explicit and complete as you can by thinking about how you think we can get the most out of reading and responding to each others work. Thoughtful answers and commentary to what the writers have written. Also probably discuss what were trying to make through. What exactly our point is, and how we can get it across. Bringing out points we liked and points we didnt like, and why. Try to relate it to yourself and think, would you keep reading this paper if you wanted to? Not just because you had to?