The Importance of Feedback

Up until this semester, I did not have good experiences with feedback about writing. In high school, my teachers would provide a few suggestions that made no sense, I would turn in my final draft with little to no changes, and still get a good grade. However, this semester, I learned that one of the most important parts of the writing process is to receive feedback and use it to improve your writing. This does not mean just making simple grammatical corrections and adding to a few ideas. I did not realize that feedback for one piece of writing should be used when writing other pieces. Several times I found myself reading the same comments on my essays over and over again. Once I read the feedback and made the corrections, I pushed the valuable information that the feedback provided out of my mind. This was a bad idea. 

Feedback comes in many different forms, which is something else that I learned this semester. In high school, I never had to read another student’s paper and provide in-depth feedback. In this class, that changed quickly with the workshops. While reading other papers, I quickly realized that my suggestions for “what should the writer do next?” could be applied to my own writing. Before turning in my first draft of essays, I never asked myself this question. However, I had to critically analyze and ask this question about other papers, which opened my eyes to all of the potential areas of improvement for those papers. Surprisingly, I didn’t even have to re-read my own paper to realize that these were usually the same improvements that my paper needed. 

Until this class, I only saw feedback as negative because it told me the weaknesses of my paper. However, I now see the positive aspects of it as well. Learning what my classmates loved most about my writing was extremely helpful because it was also able to make my best points even better, which strengthened my papers overall. 

The most common feedback that I received on my essays was that I was not specific enough or did not provide enough examples. In my intellectual history, I was way too abstract instead of being concrete and specific. In my close reading essay I didn’t use specific decisions made by Lorna Finlayson. In my inquiry I made too many assumptions instead of providing real-life examples to support those assumptions. My inquiry is the essay that I feel improved the most because I did the most complete job in becoming more specific. I accomplished this mainly by asking my friends several questions about their personal views on sports betting, and how that related to the claims I made in my essay. I also made the connection between my points much clearer. Going forward, I need to be sure that I always support my claims with concrete evidence, so that the reader can clearly understand my thought process.