As my students hone their skills as readers who, as an “audience of allies” or “audience of peers,” are providing nonevaluative feedback for their classmates, I wanted to repost some scattered ideas about what nonevaluative feedback looks like, and why I think it is important.
By contrast, when we think about evaluative feedback, we usually mean things like grades, rubrics, and the occasional “It’s good” or “This sucks”–phrases that I usually hear coming from informal peer feedback.
Instead, what we are attempting to do by providing nonevaluative feedback is to help writers make their writing better, by pointing out ways that they can make substantive changes to their ideas. A grade will not do this, and neither will an evaluation of “good” or “bad.” Editing the mechanical errors is a quick fix for the obvious corrections, but these do little to help the ideas that a writer is trying to develop. In fact, making substantive changes to our writing takes much more work than this, which is why English teachers hope that students learn how to use their peers as a readership that can help them improve their writing.
Peter Elbow states that the goal of nonevaluative response “is to show writers that they have been heard and understood,” and I think this statement gets at the heart of the issue. Do we write to communicate, or do we write to be evaluated? As I type this post, I know that I am focusing on the idea of communicating these ideas in writing. However I fear that oftentimes when my students write, communication becomes placed on the back burner, and evaluation becomes the focus. This is a shame, and something that we need to fix. Below are some suggestions for questions that we can address that help distance our feedback from evaluation, and instead focus on communication:
What does the writing say? Imply?
What is the writer’s point of view or stance?
How is the writing organized, and why?
What areas did you enjoy reading (what worked, what was strongly argued and proven)?
What areas did you want to read more about, or what areas did you want to see developed further (Could the writer integrate more specific examples, or analyze the language of the evidence, or focus more on one part)?
What parts confused you or were vague? How could he or she clarify them? Where should they put his or her revision focus?