Hi. When we responded to the I Am a Writer assignments, we responded just to let someone know that we were listening to them, that we cared about what they wrote about, that we were reading it, that we had questions about it, that we wanted to engage them as writers. Today we're going to think about responding toward revision which builds on that. You still want to maintain the idea that feedback is often just to let someone know that you read what they had to say and share what you think about it. Responding to our revision though, you go into that with the understanding that the feedback that you offer that writer will help him or her improve that project and also help him or her improve his or her writing in general. You want to think about revising based on things that you can say that are large scale, smaller scale or proofreading. What I'd especially like you to focus on are what I would call, what I and many others call, the global or large scale aspects of writing. They're listed here. So, it's the main ideas of a piece of writing, what has a person said, what evidence is included, what's the organization of a piece, what are in general the strengths, what are in general aspects that a person might want to improve on. Smaller scale aspects that you might want to focus on are transition sentences, paragraph unity, the opening of the piece, the closing of the piece, the scholarly system of citation. Those are all local level, smaller scale things. The reason why you don't want to focus on these exclusively, or even first, is that if you think about, if you're going to change an entire paragraph, or suggest that someone add a certain paragraph, it doesn't really make sense for you to go through and kind of copy, edit someone's paragraph If that writer is going to delete it altogether anyways, in the end, or change a sentence based on content. So you often want to think about content first, giving feedback on the content, and then later on, giving some feedback on kind of editing smaller scale aspects. The third aspect of feedback and the most minimal at this point for us is proofreading and grammar. Of course proofreading and grammar are important. When they're not done properly, it's distracting, as a reader, to read through writing that is not accurate in terms of spelling errors or grammatical errors or proofread properly. However, you don't want to offer someone too many suggestions about what to change in terms really small things. Again because they might be just taking out that entire sentence altogether, and then you've kind of wasted your time, right, and their time. You are a valuable responder and you want to spend your time offering kind of substantial, intellectual, meaningful feedback to each other. And I want to share with you an experience that I I had, I joined a Coursera course, I won't say which one, in the fall. And I submitted a writing project for one of the assignments, and I was so excited to get my feedback because I was really curious what people would have to say. And the feedback I got made me feel happy, because it was very positive. It was, you did this really well, it's interesting, it's good, but I didn't get any feedback that actually offered me any suggestions for how I could improve the piece of writing or how I could move forward in thinking about my own writing. And so I really want you to kind of take that responsibility seriously. Writers want to hear what's working, and you want to notice what's working. But you also want to be able to share with another writer what he or she can move forward with, and that's not a critical, bad thing, that's just what writers kind of need. And also, always keep in mind that reading other people's work will make you a better writer. So you're not just giving feedback. You're creating a dialog about writing by reading and responding to someone else's writing.
