Less paper grading and more weekly writing conferences After working 18 years as a communication professional, in the fall of 1994 I took up a full-time college teaching job and taught a basic course in news writing for the first time. One of the frustrations I had then and continue to have is seeing students reach a plateau in their writing expertise and not move beyond it. As graded writing assignments were handed back to students each week I looked for signs of interest on their part in reading the comments, corrections, and suggestions for improvement I had labored over writing on their papers. Little was evident. This was painfully obvious in instances when students made the same type of mistakes on subsequent assignments. Out of 13 students who completed my first news writing course (five students withdrew during the semester) all earned Cs or better, but only one earned an A in the class. At least three of the students were capable of making a higher letter grade than they did, but did not make the effort to do so. In class, I had often reviewed story samples of the assigned exercises. This usually consisted of several examples of bad or problematic writing and one model of good treatment of the given assignment. When I taught the course the next fall, in an effort to emphasize the positive, I spent much more time showing models of good writing, and wrote many more comments to students about what they had done correctly on their assignments. This time, of 12 students who finished the semester (10 dropped out during the term) one received an F, one a D, and the rest earned a C or better; two students earned As in the class. Not a marked improvement. Although the number of As doubled, the class grade point average dropped slightly, from 2.69 to 2.33. Still, had I the feeling that many of the students had made progress in their writing skills and learned much from their errors, the results would yet have been satisfying. But, it was a disappointing experience once again, because students seemed to gain little from the feedback written on their papers other than the knowledge of what grade they had earned on a given assignment. My experience was far from unique. This was brought home to me by renowned English professor and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Donald M. Murray's account of his early experience in teaching (Learning by Teaching, Boynton/Cook, 1982): I used to mark up every student paper diligently. ... No one escaped the blow of my awk. And then one Sunday afternoon a devil bounded to the arm of my chair. I started giving purposefully bad counsel on my students' papers to see what would happen. Do this backward, add adjectives and adverbs, general and abstract, edit with a purple pencil, you don't mean white. Not one student questioned my comments. What Murray did about it as an English teacher and what I have learned about similar methods gaining wide usage within the newspaper industry have begun to suggest a different way of teaching that offers me some hope as a journalism and mass communication instructor. Importance of feedback Both times I had taught news writing, the class met evenings once a week for three hours. This limited the opportunity for contact with students while they were working on writing assignments and for discussion about their writing, other than during the class meeting. At the same time I was teaching undergraduates, I experienced a role reversal as a student taking graduatelevel journalism classes at the University of North Texas. In a reporting practices course there, which also met one evening a week for three hours, I experienced some dissatisfaction with the traditional way of dealing with writing assignments as a student. An exercise would be assigned one week, picked up the next, and returned the following week with a grade and a few written comments from the instructor. …