On on-line feedback...

Rather than describing a hypothetical, I just included a link to a student's creative writing blog. Click on the title of this post to see her blog (note that her last name is used nowhere on the blog).

You will see her short rough draft and among the comments you can see what I wrote (and what some of my student's wrote. You should note that we are just starting to talk about constructive criticism, so this is a new thing for my students, but I'm sure they will get better.)

I choose to address what I thought was the biggest issue in this student's writing rather than attacking smaller issues such as spelling and grammar. We can address those points later. But, for this first post of hers, I gave her some positive feedback and then wrote about how I felt the main character of her story needs to change over the course of the story. This is a classic writing workshop critique, and a major issue that needs to be addressed in any story.

I think it's important to keep on-line feedback positive and constructive -- especially with something as personal as creative writing. Students can easily misconstrue written text because it carries so much less tone that verbal comments.

They way that I am training my students to perform on-line feedback is that we spent some time talking about constructive criticism. We looked at a simple poem that I wrote badly and we went around the room and came up with ways to write criticism. Next, they are required to post three times on other's blogs, but I moderate all the comments initially. I haven't had to deny publication for any of my student's comments. Then, as a class, we are going to look at the first comments and try to figure out which ones were good and why they were good.

I will require that they have three good comments - and they will keep posting till they have given three interesting constructive comments to their peers. (On a feedback sheet I will let them know how many they have that count and why they are good comments.)