Why I Won’t Just Give You The Answer
Note: As long as I’ve been ungrading, I’ve been asking students to collaboratively and individually assess their work on major projects: What makes for an effective version of this project? How is your own project doing? Yet, this activity is rare and—as research shows—sometimes received with confusion (see Carillo 2021, Litterio 2016). So, I wrote up an explainer to share with students, about why collaborative and self-assessment are key to writing growth, helping students acquire autonomy and agency as writers—first in academic contexts but also in professional and personal ones.
I get the desire to have somebody just tell you the answer. I really get it. When I was growing up, my friend group played a lot of riddles—and I was always the last person to get the answer, and somebody else would always have to spell it out for me. If I’d been stuck in the cave with Gollum instead of Bilbo, I would have been eaten for sure. Being the last person to get something is embarrassing, mortifying.
The thing is, though, good writing is not a riddle. There’s not one correct answer, which you either get or you don’t. There’s many ways to write well, and I want you to be free to choose among them.
We often talk about writing as though there’s right and wrong ways to do it. Maybe your high school teacher told you not to use the first person in your essays, or maybe you were told that every paragraph needs to have at least five sentences. Maybe, like me, you were told never to join two sentences with a comma. The idea behind all of these suggestions is that there are general, context-free principles for good writing, principles that apply in any time, any place, with any audience or purpose.
But writing doesn’t work that way. Driving works that way. Once you learn to drive, the rules are pretty much the same from city to city. Stop at the red lights, go on the green lights, drive on the right-hand side of the road—unless you drive on the left-hand side of the road! (In fact, almost everything we do as human beings is at least a little influenced by context, even driving.)
Writing, however, can’t be taught “in general,” as Elizabeth Wardle writes. What Wardle, a professor of Writing Studies, means by that is that you can’t learn to write in a way that carries forward, from your first-year writing course to your professional and technical writing course, to your cover letter and finally your first job. To some degree, in each new context, you learn to write all over again.
This doesn’t mean you learn to write from scratch, though. Ideally, what you learn in your writing courses is to think and write rhetorically—or, put another way, to make choices about your writing that account for who you are, who your audience is, what kind of a document you’re writing, and what your goals are (among other things). You can learn to think rhetorically, and carry it forward from course to course and from your education into your professional career. This is my goal for you as your teacher. Sure, I want you to try your hand at genres you might use in your career—a cover letter, a set of instructions, a usability analysis. But more than that, I want you to think about why you are making the writing choices you are making. I want you to learn to think rhetorically.
I believe—and research shows—that collaborative and self-assessment is the best way to do that. If I am the only one grading your paper, then you’re going to write to please me. You’re going to write thinking about what your teacher wants. That might get you a good outcome on the next project—but it’s not going to help you learn to think rhetorically, or prepare you to adapt to the writing situations you will face in other courses, or in your career.
Collaborative and self-assessment can help you do that. Here’s what the research shows.
Collaborative and self-assessment teach you self-evaluation.
Especially if you’re new at writing, or you don’t feel confident in writing, it can be tempting to make writing decisions based on what seems “cool,” says Chanon Adsanatham, a scholar of digital writing and rhetoric. Maybe you use a new font color in your report because you like it, or you spend twenty minutes rewriting the introduction because it doesn’t sound right. I’ve done this. When I was a beginning writer, I used to spend hours revising sentences that sounded “awkward.” Unsurprisingly, I earned a bunch of Cs. “Coolness” is an attractive way to make decisions—but ultimately, an ineffective one.
In fact, as Adsanatham says, being able to judge the quality of your own work is important. If you haven’t learned to make decisions about your own writing, if you only lean on what sounds “cool” or what (you think) your teacher wants, then you haven’t really improved your writing skills in a way that will benefit you in the future. Learning to write includes learning to tell when your writing is working and when it’s not.
This is where collaborative and self-assessment come into play. When you spend the time to explain what characteristics make for a workable project, you’re learning about writing in a way you can use in the future. Adsanatham writes that setting their own benchmarks for an effective (versus an ineffective) project “pushed students to formulate and synthesize their understanding of” good writing (p. 161). The work of spelling out what makes a project successful, clarified for students what qualities go into good writing and how to make decisions about their writing. And because, as Elizabeth Wardle points out, thinking about our own work makes learning sticky, students were able to carry their decision-making abilities into other writing contexts.
Collaborative and self-assessment give you ownership over your writing.
“Coolness” is one temptation to avoid when we write, but pleasing your teacher is another. If we’re not sure what “counts” as good writing, then maybe we’ll look to what our teacher or our professor expects. How many sources does she want? Would she prefer the introductions done this way or that way? This makes sense for some projects, even in the workplace. If you are writing for your boss, you’ll need to meet your boss’s expectations.
But for a lot of projects, the more expertise you gain, the more you will be expected to make your own decisions about what your project turns out looking like and whether your project is doing what you want it to do or not. This is a hard question to answer, since obviously, deciding that your project is doing what you want is not as simple as slapping a bunch of words down, dusting off your hands, and kicking back in a lawn chair because you don’t feel like working any more. You still need to think about who you are writing for, what format or genre you’re writing in, and what you’re writing about. But you’re the one who decides what you’re aiming for with the project—and whether you’ve reached that goal.
Here again is where collaborative and self-assessment comes in. These kinds of assessments give us a chance to practice setting our own goals for what makes an effective project, beyond what a teacher might tell us. Lisa Litterio, a professor of technical writing, found that when her students used collaborative and self-assessment, they experienced more “autonomy” and “ownership” over the evaluation process. Students didn’t have to guess at what the teacher wanted anymore. Instead, students spelled out what they wanted the project to look like—and then worked towards that.
Students were in the driver’s seat.
Collaborative and self-assessment help you learn.
Maybe one thing you’re taking away from this reading—I hope you’re taking it away from this reading!—is that the work of reflecting on your learning and on your writing goals, then setting your own criteria or standards for the project, is a lot of work. All this work pays off, though.
The work of thinking about the project you’re trying to write, and whether the project you’re actually writing lines up with it or not, is the work of learning. All the work you spend making your goals and audience and genre clear, to yourself and to your classmates, makes your learning sticky, and helps ensure that you’ll be able to do this work again and again—in other classes, in the workplace, as you advance in college and in your career. For her own students, Litterio found that self-assessments, students writing about how their work lined up (or didn’t line up) with the criteria established in the collaborative rubrics, offered a chance “for learning and reflecting on their progress as writers.” The more you think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and whether your choices work with or against the criteria you established with your classmates, the more you will be able to make savvy, workable choices as a writer.
This, ultimately, is my goal for you in a writing class. I want you to be able to write in the genres we practice, of course. I want you to be able to rely on the skills we practice. But more than that, I want you to be able to make purposeful, savvy decisions about why you are writing in the way that you’re writing. This skill, more than any other, is what will serve you well in the future.
So what?
We’ll create a collaborative rubric for every project you submit this term. Also, for every project you submit, you’ll write a self-assessment, explaining what’s working for you in your project and what you need to keep working on. You’ll compare your project to the rubric we created together and do this for every project you submit this term.
My hope is that you see this as more than hoop to jump through. I am not trying to trick you. I do not have a hidden, secret list of criteria by which I will judge your writing. Rather, I am inviting you to become writers: capable of thinking critically about what your projects need to do to be successful, both in terms of your own goals and your audience’s expectations, without a teacher’s voice to spell it out for you. Now, you get a voice on whether your project works—and why. This, in the end, is what will make you a better writer.
Megan Von Bergen is a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is currently writing a dissertation about the history of grades in first-year composition and the emergence of ungrading. She has been using ungrading in her courses since Summer 2019. When she has free time, she likes running really, really long distances.