To Critique, Or Not to Critique

I've been thinking about a recent blog post over at Harriet, John S. O'Connor's "Commenting On Comments," in which he writes,

As a student I suffered through the bleeders (teachers whose pens leaked so much red ink that the page looked like a crime scene) and the teachers who wrote short pithy judgments like “Awk!” that sat atop lines the like the murder of crows on telephone wires in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. (Communication channels are always the first to go in horror movies). These teachers never motivated me to write more. Rather they made me afraid to speak and encouraged me to take fewer risks in order to avoid the harsh and cryptic marginal “notes.”

Such comments end rather than promote discussion. Worse, they breed cynicism and self-doubt. As a college freshman, my wife was told by a poetry teacher that she had written the best poem she would ever write. Though this comment was meant to be positive, it strikes me as just about the worst possible pronouncement a teacher can make. How different than William Stafford’s advice in Leaving a Writer’s Conference: “Listen — if it was OK/this time, the world can surprise us/again.”

Luckily I had a number of teachers who read my work the way Raymond Carver might have. They encouraged me to re-write my work and took the time to talk over the choices I had made and the choices I had not considered. I try to keep these models in mind when I read student work. The only judgments I write are positive, the only declarative sentences encouraging. When writing is infelicitous – okay, awkward! – I write questions: How else might this sentence be written? What are you assuming about your readers here? Can you think of a more powerful verb here?

These are not rhetorical questions. With my comments I hope to hear my students’ responses, to read their revisions, and to talk with them about their writing. Like Carver, I want my implicit message to be, “Keep writing.”

I haven't been able stop thinking about this blog post, because I've tried both of these strategies: the incisive (though never harsh) comments that make specific suggestions for revision and the encouraging questions that ask what if? In my experience, the first strategy occasionally produces some resentment but also leads to more dramatic and exciting transformations in student writings. The second strategy, the non-rhetorical rhetorical questions seldom lead to anything except complacency.

Many students, even some of the best ones, are comfortable doing nothing, unless really pushed to do something. I speak from personal experience when I say that true revision is learned behavior. Yes, young writers will change a word here and there, a comma, an occasional adjective. But for students to consider a radical re(en)visioning often takes something more. That more is usually the worn-out professor who pokes and prods and pushes.

Reading O'Connor's piece, I was particularly interested in the idea that this first pedagogical approach made him "afraid to speak and encouraged [him] to take fewer risks in order to avoid the harsh and cryptic marginal 'notes.'" In my experience, the comments that students perceive as harsh and cryptic seldom are. If a student puts an abstraction into a poem, I might write something like "this abstraction would be much effective if concealed inside a concrete object, an image." Harsh? No, except that students often resent having the abstractions in their work pointed to. They may view any critique as cruel, no matter how kind the suggestions for revision. Cryptic? Again, no, except when students have never considered the role that images play in expressing ideas, themes, and emotion.

Many students approach the creative writing class with the dearly held belief that their work will be perfect, ready for The New Yorker, and they are then shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to receive any critique. As a result, even the gentlest critique can feel like a slap. On the other hand, those carefully worded questions, what would happen if you put an image here?, are so easy for them ignore. The questions slide off of them, water off the poetry-duck's back.

Sometimes, when I have a student who isn't happy with critique, I think about giving her a choice. On the one hand, I could respond to her projects with a few non-rhetorical rhetorical questions. This approach is easy and expends little brain power. I could write a few vague words of encouragement and move on to the next assignment. On the other hand, I could read the work, consider its flaws, and try to come up with some concrete suggestions for revising the project. I could urge my students to consider these suggestions. This second approach is the one I usually take; it's hard work, tiring, because it forces me to sit inside the creaking rooms of the student's writing, to locate the successful moments, and to scrutinize the failures. But if a student doesn't want this analysis, then maybe it's best not to offer it. Perhaps, I could save a lot of hours of grading, a lot of bruised feelings, if I just wrote a few questions. What would happen if you wrote this in first-person? What would be the result if you cut a few of the adjectives? How would the story be changed if the mother liked applesauce?

But I don't buy it. Pedagogical approach #2 seems like a cop-out, a way for the teacher to play nice-guy, to risk nothing. And, occasionally, I'm willing to be seen as Mean Professor, if something I say can make my students better readers, better citizens in the classroom, and every once in a while, better writers.