This is a handout that I give to my students in the introductory linguistics course I TA for as part of their in-class midterm exam. They are asked to combine/rearrange some parts and add examples about themselves, which they usually prefer doing because it seems more like writing an essay than filling out a "bubble sheet".
Students conclude with two effective strategies: (1) providing some examples of their own, when applicable, and (2) analyzing successfully written feedback on write my essay assignments that they have received previously. This allows them to illustrate what effective feedback may look like, while also revealing how feedback should not be addressed. Example 1: A short list of negative comments followed by one positive comment. The following is an example of how easy it is to write a bad comment, and while the author did not intend this, negative comments can be discouraging if they are not supplemented with helpful ones. These types of comments would be particularly harmful coming from someone who does not know or understand your writing style.
This is an example of someone trying to give criticism but failing at doing so because he does not appreciate where you were going with your writing. He needs to take the time to understand your writing style before attempting a negative commentary on it. No particular comment - The author obviously did not write anything here, yet if this had been my assignment, I would have felt discouraged by this lack of feedback. The professor may be making assumptions about what was wrong (or right) with the paper without having explained his or her thoughts on it in any way whatsoever. This teaches students nothing about how they can improve their work, and probably won't make much sense upon reflection either. If an essay writer thinks of something to say, it is his or her responsibility to communicate that comment in some way. Caveat: Since this was written by an undergraduate student for an introductory linguistics class who has taken no formal English courses before (and had no experience writing papers of any sort), the mistakes are particularly egregious. A more experienced writer or one with a different linguistic background could have undoubtedly done a better job on this assignment and received less negative feedback. The point of this is not that you should judge anyone's grammatical skills from what they write, but that even in well-written essays there can be room for improvement.
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