Upon reviewing these findings, Connors and Lunsford said the number of papers that had grades but no commentary amazed their readers. “The overwhelming impression our readers were left with was that grades were implicitly— or often explicitly— overwhelming impediments both for teachers and for students” (208). Further, they found such a wide range of grading styles, ranging from numerical to symbol-based, that they had to abandon their plan to average all the grades.
The most common commentary they found was terminal comments. This, they explain, is likely because of two reasons: the comment is a natural reaction immediately after concluding the reading and it is more private than a note on the front. Those teachers who did partake in initial commentary seemed to Connors and Lunsford to wish to encourage their students to consider key issues prior to their reviewing the graded work. The two researchers studied the contents of these comments to discover whether or not they reflected the beliefs of the field of composition studies. Connors and Lunsford provide detailed explanations for each of the categories listed in the above graphs, however I will only focus on the ones I deem most relevant.
The first grouping that stood out to me was the commentary consisting entirely of negative commentary. According to their findings, 23% of the papers with commentary consisted of such negativity. Many of the teachers, they found, expressed feelings of extreme disappointment, some harshly so. For example, one teacher wrote about a student’s comma splice error, “You must eliminate this error once and for all. Is it because you aren’t able to recognize an independent clause?” (210). Another wrote, “Besides receiving an F for the paper, I’m lowering another grade 20 points” (215). I agree with Connors and Lunsford’s assessment that while this sort of commentary will not improve a student’s writing, it will almost certainly negatively impact their attitude both about writing as well as the teacher. At 42% of the essays, the most common commentary pattern consisted of a positive note that ended with a negative critique, a tendency that the researchers found heartening and one that I recognize as being a trait of my own response style.
The limited number of comments addressing purpose and audience surprised me. According to their research, 11% of the responses addressed purpose, and 6% addressed audience considerations such as tone or voice. The implication the lack of concern about audience and purpose suggests that there is no other audience to be considered beside the teacher. This seems to be a result of the push for a recognition of the teacher as a reader, the history of which Connors and Lunsford outlined earlier in their work. Essentially, prior to the 1950s, the teacher's main job was to rate compositions, not evaluate rhetoric. In 1951, Jeffrey Fleece suggest that “teachers actually consider themselves as students’ real audiences and respond to their essays accordingly… why not stop pretending that the teacher was not the only final and actual audience for students, and make use of that audience relationship?” (203). While this suggestion opened student essays up to a dialectic treatment of their work, it seems to have caused teachers to stop addressing audience considerations in their evaluations.
Connors and Lunsford conclude that overwork, incomplete training and high curricular demands cause teachers to grade compositions in a manner unique to the traditional paradigm, despite those same teachers’ awareness and agreement with the teachings of the new paradigm. They continue to use grading sheets and rubrics that emphasize final product assessment, a habit that the researchers found limited holistic approaches and resulted in harsher grading. Connors and Lunsford culminate their article with a call to future studies to focus on analyzing comment contents more thoroughly, a suggestion with which I agree.
