Style and the Pedagogy of Response

Abstract

This essay expands style pedagogy to include teachers' comments on student writing. To do so, it analyzes three major studies on response and the conceptions of style they both reflect and perpetuate. Ultimately, this essay argues that to teach style effectively though written commentary, we must use language that moves beyond impression and considers the rhetoricality of students' stylistic choices.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewers Frank Farmer and Duane Roen for their valuable feedback, and Editor Theresa Enos and Assistant Editor Elise Verzosa for their organization and communication throughout this process. Thanks also to my colleagues who provided helpful responses on earlier drafts of this essay.

²In this essay I use the term response interchangeably with commentary to refer to teachers' comments on student writing and evaluation to refer more generally to a summative assessment of a piece of writing. Judgment refers to a determination based on a particular value system and is not meant to refer to a type of assessment; therefore, it is used only as part of the phrase “value judgment” in this essay. Finally, my use of assessment is limited to evaluations of student writing by a teacher within a classroom context.

³This comment was not written by Connors and Lunsford but was collected as data for their study.