Feedback on Writing

1.     Definition of Feedback

Feedback is conceptualized as information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one's performance or understanding. A teacher or parent can provide corrective information, a peer can provide an alternative strategy, a book can provide information to clarify ideas, a parent can provide encouragement, and a learner can look up the answer to evaluate the correctness of a response. Feedback thus is a "consequence" of performance. Winne and Butler (1994) provided an excellent summary in their claim that "feedback is information which a learner can confirm, add to, overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information is domain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cognitive tactics and strategies" (p. 5740).

2.      The Focus of Feedback: The Four Levels

The focus of feedback is critically important. According to John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007:90) there are four major levels and that the level at which feedback is directed influences its effectiveness.

a)      Feedback Task (FT)

Feedback can be about a task or product, such as whether work is correct or incorrect. This level of feedback may include directions to acquire more, different, or correct information.

b)      Feedback Processing The Task (FP)

Feedback can be aimed at the process used to create a product or complete a task. This kind of feedback is more directly aimed at the processing of information, or learning processes requiring understanding or completing the task. For example, a teacher or peer may say to a learner, "You need to edit this piece of writing by attending to the descriptors you have used so the reader is able to understand the nuances of your meaning," or "This page may make more sense if you use the strategies we talked about earlier."

c)      Feedback Self-Regulation (FR)

Feedback to students can be focused at the self-regulation level, including greater skill in self-evaluation or confidence to engage further on a task. For example, "You already know the key features of the opening of an argument. Check to see whether you have incorporated them in your first paragraph." Such feedback can have major influences on self-efficacy, self-regulatory proficiencies, and self-beliefs about students as learners, such that the students are encouraged or informed how to better and more effortlessly continue on the task.

d)     Feedback Self as A Person (FS)

Feedback can be personal in the sense that it is directed to the "self," which, we argue below, is too often unrelated to performance on the task. Examples of such feedback include "You are a great student" and '"That's an intelligent response, well done."

Thus, there is a distinction between feedback about the task (FT), the processing of the task (FP), self-regulation (FR), and about the self as a person (FS). John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007:90) argue that FS is the least effective, FR and FP are powerful in terms of deep processing and mastery of tasks, and FT is powerful when the task information subsequently is useful for improving strategy processing or enhancing selfregulation (which it too rarely does).

3.      Written Feedback Techniques

“When handing back students’ written work or using a computer ‘reviewing program’ to give feedback on word – processed documents we can use a number of devices to help them write more successfully in the future”, Harmer (2011:110).

In this case, Harmer (2011:110) stated that there are some techniques on written feedback:

a)      Responding

One way of considering feedback is to think of it as ‘responding’ to students’ work rather than assessing or evaluating what they have done. When we respond we say, how the text appears to us and how successful we think it has been and sometime how it could be improved. When we respond to a final written product we can say what we liked, how we felt about the text, and what they might do next time if the students are going to write something similar.

b)      Coding

Some teachers use codes and put them in the body of the writing itself or in a corresponding margin. This makes correction much neater, less threatening and considerably ore helpful than random marks and comments. Frequently used symbols of this kind refer to issues such as word order, spelling, or verb tense as in the following table:

Symbol	Meaning	Example
S	Incorrect spelling	s I receieved jour letter.
W.O	Wrong word order	W.O We know well the city.
T	Wrong tense	T If he will come, it will be too late.
C	Concord, subject and verb do not agree	C The policemen has come.
WF	Wrong form	WF That table is our.
S/P	Singular or Plural form wrong	S We need more informations.
λ	Something has been left out	He hit me on λ  shoulder.
[  ]	Something is not necessary	[  ] It was too much difficult.
?M	Meaning is not clear	?M The view from here is  suggestive.
NA	The usage is not appropriate	NA He requested me to sit down.
P	Punctuation wrong	P Whats your name?

When we use these codes we mark the place where a mistake has been made and use one of the symbols in the margin to show what the problem is. The student have to correct the mistake.

We can decide on the particular codes and symbols we use with the students, making sure that they are quite clear about what our symbols mean through demonstration and example. We might also consider having a two – stage approach with simple and more complex codes for students at different levels  (Cox and Evre, 1999).

We have to be cautious about the tone of our comments. The margin of a paper are small and can force us into short comments. When writing short comments, we tend to leave out the words that soften our message. While we my think “I’m not sure I understand your point here,” the limited space may cause you to write simply, “Unclear” or just “?”. Students can see comments such as these as unkind and unhelpful. Feeedback need not always be written in the margins but it can be in forms: individual conferences, taped responses, typed summary responses, etc (Nunan, 2003:93).

References:

Harmer, Jeremy. (2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching Third Edition. New York: Longman

Hattie, John and Timperley. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77, 81-112. Retrieven on Juny 11^st, 2014 from http://education.qld.gov.au/staff/development/performance/resources/readings/power-feedback.pdf

Lainuddin, Mochammad. The Effect of Giving Feedback to Students' Writing. Retrieved on May 18^th, 2014 from http://journal.teflin.org/index.php/teflin/article/viewFile/83/184

Nunan, David. (2003). Practical English Language Teaching. New York: McGrawn-Hill

The Writing Process

Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing.

a)      Prewriting

Prewriting is planning stage to decide axactly what will be writing about and how can most effectively present the ideas (Little, 1985:112). From the statement above, we can conclude that prewriting is anything you do before you write on your paper. This stage include brainstorming, clustering, strategic questioning, sketching, free writing, exploring the sense, interviewing, and information gathering.

i)              Brainstorming

Based on a topic of writing performance, students call out as many associations as possible while the teacher (or students) jots them down.

ii)            Clustering

Clustering can be considered the most important unsupervised learning problem; so, as every other problem of this kind, it deals with finding a structure ina collection of unlabelled data. A loose definition of clustering could be “the process of organizing objects into groups whose members are similar in some way”. A cluster is therefore a collection of objects which are “similar” between them and are “dissimilar” to the objects belonging to other cluster.

iii)          Strategic questioning

Students answer a set of questions designed to guide their writing, such as “What do you want to write about?”, “What is your goal?”,”What do you know this topic?”,”What do you need to find out?”,”Who might want to read?”,”What you are to write about?”.

iv)          Sketching

Students draw a series sketches that represent ideas for an essay. For example: The Nasrudin clever man of short story.

v)            Free writing

Students write non-stop on a topic for a set time (e.g. five minutes). They stop to read and consider what they wrote and then write non-stop again for another set amount of time.

vi)          Exploring the sense

Suitable for generating ideas for descriptive essay, the teachers guides students through their senses by asking them to visualize, hear, smell, aand feel a person or place.

vii)        Interviewing

Students interview each other or go outside the classroom to interview people on a particular topic.

viii)      Information gathering

Students collect information about a topic through library research.

b)      Drafting

As the second stage in the writing process, drafting is a series of strategies designed to organize and develop a sustained piece of writing. Once planning has enable us to identify several subjects and encouraged to gather information on thus subjects from different perspectives, we need to determine what we can best accomplish in writing. We need to select one subject and organize our information about it into meaningful cluster. Then, we need to find connections among thus clusters and discover the relationship that links the connections, according to McCrimmon (1984:10).

c)      Revising

Revising is a procedure for improving or correcting a work in progress. As the third stage I writing process, revising a series of strategies designed to re-examine and re-evaluate the choices that have created piece of writing. After we have completed our preliminary draft, we need to stand back from our text and decide what action would seem to be most productive. We may have to embark upon global revision a complete re-creation of the word of our writing. We may be able to begin local revision a concerted effort tp perfect to smaller elements in a piece of writing we have already created, McCrimmon (1984:11)

d)     Editing

According to Gebhard (2000:230), Editing is required to recognize problems in grammar (e.g. subject – verb disgreement, improper pronoun use, incorrect verb tense), syntax (e.g. fragments and run – on sentences), and mechanics (e.g. spelling and punctuation errors). Some students can become lost in thought with editing so much that they equate good writing with correct grammar, syntax, word choice, and mechanics rather than with the expression of meaning of which editing is simply a part.

References:

Vinahari, Risqi. (2011). The Effect of Pair Correction on Writing Performance of the Second Grade Students at MTs Nurul 'Ula Jamsaren Kediri. Skripsi, English Department the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Nusantara PGRI Kediri University.

10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly

By Michael C. Munger

1. Writing is an exercise. You get better and faster with practice. If you were going to run a marathon a year from now, would you wait for months and then run 26 miles cold? No, you would build up slowly, running most days. You might start on the flats and work up to more demanding and difficult terrain. To become a writer, write. Don't wait for that book manuscript or that monster external-review report to work on your writing.

2. Set goals based on output, not input. "I will work for three hours" is a delusion; "I will type three double-spaced pages" is a goal. After you write three pages, do something else. Prepare for class, teach, go to meetings, whatever. If later in the day you feel like writing some more, great. But if you don't, then at least you wrote something.

3. Find a voice; don't just "get published." James Buchanan won a Nobel in economics in 1986. One of the questions he asks job candidates is: "What are you writing that will be read 10 years from now? What about 100 years from now?" Someone once asked me that question, and it is pretty intimidating. And embarrassing, because most of us don't think that way. We focus on "getting published" as if it had nothing to do with writing about ideas or arguments. Paradoxically, if all you are trying to do is "get published," you may not publish very much. It's easier to write when you're interested in what you're writing about.

4. Give yourself time. Many smart people tell themselves pathetic lies like, "I do my best work at the last minute." Look: It's not true. No one works better under pressure. Sure, you are a smart person. But if you are writing about a profound problem, why would you think that you can make an important contribution off the top of your head in the middle of the night just before the conference?

Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don't worry that what you write is not very good and isn't immediately usable. You get ideas whenyou write; you don't just write down ideas.

The articles and books that will be read decades from now were written by men and women sitting at a desk and forcing themselves to translate profound ideas into words and then to let those words lead them to even more ideas. Writing can be magic, if you give yourself time, because you can produce in the mind of some other person, distant from you in space or even time, an image of the ideas that exist in only your mind at this one instant.

5. Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant. And the more unwritten it is, the more brilliant it is. We have all met those glib, intimidating graduate students or faculty members. They are at their most dangerous holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, in some bar or at an office party. They have all the answers. They can tell you just what they will write about, and how great it will be.

Years pass, and they still have the same pat, 200-word answer to "What are you working on?" It never changes, because they are not actually working on anything, except that one little act.

You, on the other hand, actually are working on something, and it keeps evolving. You don't like the section you just finished, and you are not sure what will happen next. When someone asks, "What are you working on?," you stumble, because it is hard to explain. The smug guy with the beer and the cigarette? He's a poseur and never actually writes anything. So he can practice his pat little answer endlessly, through hundreds of beers and thousands of cigarettes. Don't be fooled: You are the winner here. When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired. If you don't feel like that, then you aren't working hard enough.

6. Pick a puzzle. Portray, or even conceive, of your work as an answer to a puzzle. There are many interesting types of puzzles:

• "X and Y start with same assumptions but reach opposing conclusions. How?"
• "Here are three problems that all seem different. Surprisingly, all are the same problem, in disguise. I'll tell you why."
• "Theory predicts [something]. But we observe [something else]. Is the theory wrong, or is there some other factor we have left out?"

Don't stick too closely to those formulas, but they are helpful in presenting your work to an audience, whether that audience is composed of listeners at a lecture or readers of an article.

7. Write, then squeeze the other things in. Put your writing ahead of your other work. I happen to be a "morning person," so I write early in the day. Then I spend the rest of my day teaching, having meetings, or doing paperwork. You may be a "night person" or something in between. Just make sure you get in the habit of reserving your most productive time for writing. Don't do it as an afterthought or tell yourself you will write when you get a big block of time. Squeeze the other things in; the writing comes first.

8. Not all of your thoughts are profound. Many people get frustrated because they can't get an analytical purchase on the big questions that interest them. Then they don't write at all. So start small. The wonderful thing is that you may find that you have traveled quite a long way up a mountain, just by keeping your head down and putting one writing foot ahead of the other for a long time. It is hard to refine your questions, define your terms precisely, or know just how your argument will work until you have actually written it all down.

9. Your most profound thoughts are often wrong. Or, at least, they are not completely correct. Precision in asking your question, or posing your puzzle, will not come easily if the question is hard.

I always laugh to myself when new graduate students think they know what they want to work on and what they will write about for their dissertations. Nearly all of the best scholars are profoundly changed by their experiences in doing research and writing about it. They learn by doing, and sometimes what they learn is that they were wrong.

10. Edit your work, over and over. Have other people look at it. One of the great advantages of academe is that we are mostly all in this together, and we all know the terrors of that blinking cursor on a blank background. Exchange papers with peers or a mentor, and when you are sick of your own writing, reciprocate by reading their work. You need to get over a fear of criticism or rejection. Nobody's first drafts are good. The difference between a successful scholar and a failure need not be better writing. It is often more editing.

If you have trouble writing, then you just haven't written enough. Writing lots of pages has always been pretty easy for me. I could never get a job being only a writer, though, because I still don't write well. But by thinking about these tips, and trying to follow them myself, I have gotten to the point where I can make writing work for me and my career.

Michael C. Munger is chairman of political science at Duke University, a position he has held since 2000.

References:

http://chronicle.com/article/10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less/124268/

How to Write Well....

Writing sounds simple—start with an attention-grabbing first sentence, then move on to some really interesting stuff in the middle, and bring it all together at the end. The trouble is how to think up that attention-grabbing first sentence? Where to go to find that really interesting stuff? What to do if the mind is as blank as the paper?

The solution from its problem is on this video. Now, let's learn how to write well and watch this video out.

References:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CF0QtwIwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIR9Av-TzSV4&ei=IjW1U9nPFc2IuATCsoHoAQ&usg=AFQjCNHPN3cbiOLGL_IxA4hbK2S3FlcBCw&sig2=VYcGlEMwE2Pecy66nI5gLQ