Easing the Process: A Strategy for Evaluating Compositions

Abstract

Several years ago I resolved to devise a method of evaluating compositions which would actually help students learn to write rather than alienate or discourage them. What I came up with was an evaluative strategy enabling me to support students at critical points in the composing process: the pre-writing or thinking stage, the rough draft, the final draft, and the revision. My idea rested on the assumption that at each of these stages students face different problems, and that their successes in solving these problems need to be measured separately if they are to develop as writers. The four-part method of evaluation has been received enthusiastically by my students, and has enabled me to spend less time assigning grades and more time helping students to clarify and develop their thoughts. Evaluation, in other words, has become an integral part of teaching composition. To help students get a running start on composition, I require selfevaluation at the pre-writing and rough draft stage. Many students resist writing because they are unable to choose a subject, establish a thesis, discover ways of developing ideas and invent an audience. Self-evaluation helps them accomplish these tasks and bolsters confidence when it is most needed. A simple list of questions requiring a yes and no response (a dichotomous scale) serves for self-evaluation. Questions make the scale other than a merely prescriptive device; they engage the class in actively thinking about the relationship of writer to subject and audience. The scale is broken into two parts, each fitted to a different set of tasks (see A). The first part facilitates students' discovery of audience and topoi. The list of rhetorical methods, in particular, aids their memory, so that ideas generate other ideas. Then, after students have composed a rough draft, they evaluate its content and organization by responding to the second set of questions. To do this, they must empathize with their fictionalized audience and anticipate its needs. In so doing, they are more likely to be self-motivated than students who set out to please the instructor. Self-evaluation in the pre-writing and rough draft stages is thus designed to help students move from thought to expression.