Blog # 3 - Peter Elbow and Patrick Hartwell

Responding to: Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Writing by Peter Elbow and Grammar, Grammars, and The Teaching of Grammar by Patrick Hartwell

From this week’s readings I truly enjoyed Elbow’s essay. In his essay, Elbow talks about three different acts we call assessment. He focuses on talking about Raking, Evaluating, and Liking. By ranking he means “the act of summing up one’s judgment of a performance or person into a single, holistic number or score.” By evaluating he means “the act of expressing one’s judgment of a performance or person by posting out strengths and weaknesses of different features or dimensions.” He then says that “evaluation requires going beyond a first response that may be nothing but a kind of ranking (“I like it” or “This is better than that”), and instead looking carefully enough at a performance or person to make distinctions between parts or features or criteria.”

Elbow says that if you take the time to get to know your students as the people they are, liking their writing will be easier. As he says this, I think about the importance between having a connection with your students. I cannot imagine having to grade papers from someone I literally don’t know. It is important to have a relationship with your students so that understanding their writing becomes easier. What Elbow talks about, makes me think back about professors I’ve had when I was attending Essex and Union County College whom had no idea who I was. They wrote “awkward” on my papers and didn’t really give me direction as to where to go from there. They didn’t know what I was trying to say and worst yet, I didn’t know what they meant by “awkward”. It wasn’t until I experienced professors starting to build relationships with me that I felt like they were understanding or liking my writing. Elbow also says that the process of evaluation permits us to make open statements about a piece of writing. Whereas to rank, is to be forced to translate those discriminations into a single number. I agree with what Elbow says because while grades are important it is more important to be able to communicate about pieces of writing rather than to just receive a rank without further conversation or connection.

Hartwell’s essay was a little less enjoyable for me to read. I felt it was dense and not straightforward like Elbow’s essay was. Hartwell talks about grammar and while I think is important, I feel like when a student is composing a piece of writing other aspects are more important than commenting on their grammar. Students should be taught grammar early in their academics. This can help them in their writing but I feel like as they become more experienced writers, grammar should be secondary in their writing. Their focus should be more in expanding their ideas and what they are trying to express in their writing. Rather than fixing their grammar when they are not done yet saying what they want to say in their piece of writing.

I think that perhaps the best way to address this grammar issues is maybe by working on it by sections. Normally, when we are drafting we are focused on the content, the ideas we are trying to express rather than if our grammar is correct. Therefore, I think that grammar should be part of the editing stage rather than the revision stage.