Teachers are baffled and annoyed when a student looks only at the grade on his paper and ignores substantive comments, or, worse, doesn’t bother to pick up the paper at all. Since you’ll write many reports in your academic and professional life, it’s smart to understand how your readers judge them and what you can do next time to earn a better response. For that, you need one more plan.
When you read your teacher’s comments, focus on those that you can apply to your next project.
■ Look for a pattern of errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. If you see one, you know what to work on.
■ If your teacher says you made factual errors, check your notes: Did you take bad notes or misreport them? Were you misled by an unreliable source? Whatever you find, you know what to do in your next project.
■ If your teacher reports only her judgments of your writing, look for what causes them. If she says your writing is choppy, dense, or awkward, check your sentences using the steps in chapter 11. If she says it’s disorganized or wandering, check it against chapter 9. You won’t always find what caused the complaints, but when you do you’ll know what to work on next time.
If your teacher’s comments include words like disorganized, illogical, and unsupported and you cannot find what triggered them, make an appointment to ask. As with every other step in your project, that visit will go better if you plan and even rehearse it:
■ If your teacher marked up spelling, punctuation, and grammar, correct those errors in bold letters before you talk to your teacher to show her that you took her comments seriously. In fact, you might jot responses after her comments to show that you’ve read them closely.
■ Don’t complain about your grade. Be clear that you want only to understand the comments so that you can do better next time.
■ Focus on just a few comments. Rehearse your questions so that they’ll seem amiable: not “You say this is disorganized but you don’t say why,” but rather “Can you help me see where I went wrong with my organization so I can do better next time?”
■ Ask your instructor to point to passages that illustrate her judgments and what those passages should have looked like. Do not ask “What didn’t you like?” but rather “Where exactly did I go wrong and what could I have done to fix it?”
If your teacher can’t clearly explain her judgment, she may have graded your paper impressionistically rather than point by point. If so, bad news: you may learn little from your visit.
You might visit your teacher even if you got an A. It is important to know how you earned it, because your next project is likely to be more challenging and may even make you feel like a beginner again. In fact, don’t be surprised if that happens with every new project. It happens to most of us. But with a plan, we usually overcome it, and so can you.