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Teaching the Rhetoric of Writing Assessment 51 Her new version, a typical kind of revision, offered the following for just one of our six rubric dimensions: Be clear, interesting, and organized I think this means that the person reading the paper should understand what the writer is talking about at all times. The reader should never get lost when reading the paper. The paper should never be boring either and should get right to the point. It should also always keep my attention and not make me want to not read it. I like how you put examples from your life in your paper. It makes your paper more interesting and want to read more of it. I think your paper is really interesting and I never got bored reading it. You were very clear with your ideas also. You met criteria. Cynthia’s other judgments were equally developed and similar in their structures. In class we had discussed the importance of making sure the writer understood “where the assessor is coming from” when she makes her judgments. We found that the more informative and helpful assessment rhetorics tended to offer the assessor’s translation or understanding of the rubric dimension in question. In the more helpful documents, the assessor talks about what the rubric dimension means apart from her judgment. So we asked everyone to make sure they made this same rhetorical move when they revised their assessments after class. While Cynthia’s assessment rhetoric arguably doesn’t offer much in terms of revision advice, she does allow the writer enough information to compare her judgment to others that may conflict. Cynthia is practicing a typical academic move: identify an assumption, discuss an example or a present case in which the assumption has bearing, and make contextualized conclusions. While Cynthia’s example of including the personal in the essay doesn’t point to particular language in the essay, it is a place for her and her colleague to begin their dialogue, and it is an improvement upon her initial assessment rhetoric. To help students continue developing their assessment rhetorics by theorizing their own moves, I ask each student to reflect upon her or his assessment rhetorics and dialogues, again in structured ways. reflecT i o nS o n a SSeSSMen T rhe To ri cS Just as Cynthia reflected on the assessments she wrote for her colleagues , students can also reflect on the assessments written to them by their colleagues. This is similar to Chris M. Anson’s practice of asking students to record their spoken reflections on essay drafts, only I am 52 TEAC H In G WI T H ST U D En T T ExT S asking students to reflect not on colleagues’ essays but on colleagues’ assessment documents. Anson found that “students who lack control of their own writing seldom comment projectively, because there is little room for their own decision-making process in revision. Instead, they measure their texts against . . . [an] image of the teacher’s ‘standards’” (1999, 70). Reflecting on assessment documents encourages students to consider both the present judgments on a text and the nature of those judgments as future-looking projections that do not (or cannot) defer to a higher authority figure. For instance, I may ask students to find two specific comments or judgments, quote them, and then reflect upon what their language communicates and assumes. How do they interpret their colleagues’ judgments, and how do they interpret their colleagues’ interpretations of the rubric criterion to which that judgment refers? What assumptions about the rubric criterion in question can the writer find in her assessor’s words? How is the assessor translating, adding to, or changing the way the writer has understood the rubric dimension? In week eight of a FYW course, Matt reflects on two different colleagues ’ conflicting assessments of his paper: One assessor thought that I did a good job of conveying information in a constructively opinionated manner, so as to compile a substantial and well explained opinion in my paper. The other thought that the main point of my paper was in the way I worded my conclusion . . . I think the first assessor was judging the rubric elements in my paper much the same as I was. Both of us thought that I did a good job of explaining myself and using support to do so. I will take in their beliefs only if I can look at the rubric and at their suggestions and say wow...

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