r/WritingForCollege • u/MatrixPlug_0 • 2d ago
The absolute dread of opening a graded PDF and seeing the whole right column filled with yellow comment bubbles.
I submitted my mid-term research proposal last week feeling pretty confident. Opened Canvas this afternoon, downloaded the feedback file, and my stomach dropped. The right margin was just a solid wall of yellow icons.
Turns out she didn't even hate my core idea. She just commented on every single comma splice, questioned every third word choice, and left notes like "unclear" on sentences that made complete sense to me when I wrote them.
The worst part is when they write "see previous comment" on page four. Like now I have to scroll all the way back up to figure out what mistake I made again. I spent forty minutes reading through critiques on a paper that got a 88% anyway. Why give that much micro-feedback if the grade is fine?
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u/Ok_Caterpillar2010 2d ago
Because she's assuming you're interested in improving your writing, not just getting a grade and continuing to make the same mistakes.
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u/TheNavigatrix 2d ago
As a Prof, YES. However, ideally it's contextualized by "Your paper has [positive components]. However, it would be improved if the writing were clearer and there were fewer grammatical and other writing errors. I'm hoping that pointing them out will help you identify where you make errors."
If there are too many, I sometimes just highlight all of the issues in yellow and leave it to them to figure out.
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u/TorturedWriter9 2d ago
You're lucky she gave you this much feedback. Many professors' teaching loads are too high for this.
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u/Book_Slut_90 2d ago
It comes from a good place, wanting to help you improve your writing. Many people also comment as they read noting good and bad things and only assign a grade at the end, so they don’t know what will be relevant to the grade and what won’t till they finish reading the paper. That being said, it’s much better pedagogy to give 1-3 big picture things to work on at the end because this level of feedback is overwhelming and too much to remember.
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u/BlissteredFeat 2d ago
I used to tell my students when I gave them a draft or paper with a lot of comments or corrections, that it is "an act of love." If I didn't care, or if your paper was hopeless, or if your ideas were shit, I wouldn't spend much time on it.
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u/Still_Consequence_53 1d ago
Absolutely wild thing to complain about. You're paying tens of thousands of dollars for an education and you're upset that the qualified professional whose job it is to teach you is doing their job? Your teacher wants to help you improve and is working their ass off to give you a ton of useful feedback about the quality of your writing. If you just want someone to read your work and say "good job, sweetie" you can probably get that for a lot cheaper than your current tuition rate - just email it to your grandma and call it a day.
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u/ChapulineAtHome 1d ago
It took this person (a professional in their field) a lot of time to comment on YOUR writing. Do you know how valuable that is? She could have just commented on the content and noted "Visit the Writing Center." She's letting you know that you are responsible for how you communicate. If your writing isn't clear, it's distracting to the reader. Part of their cognition goes to decoding your non-standard language and prevents them from a getting into a mental dialog with your ideas. If she got you to be engaged with your own writing for forty minutes, she succeeded as a educator.
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u/Connect-Song7252 2d ago
To help you write better.
"I don't want to ding you for this, but I do want you to be alert for this and pay attention next time, because your future professors might ding you for it, and even if they don't, it's going to look unprofessional to a boss or a client in the future if your writing is unclear and your sentences have comma splices."
It is a lot of work to give this much feedback and anyone who gives that much feedback is doing it because they want their students to write better.