2020 Revision: Give Robots the Red Pen

As high school English teachers, I’m sure most of us have questioned our career decision only a few dozen times over the course of a school year, possibly while spending an evening or weekend dedicated to reviewing essays and giving feedback for students to (hopefully) take into consideration. Heartbreak usually followed: our feedback was either completely ignored, or the only changes they made were the changes we suggested. There was little to no ownership over their writing.

I’ve learned several strategies for peer- and self-revision: simplified feedback, focusing on no more than three areas so that students don’t get overwhelmed, writing in a more “positive” pen color than red in an attempt to reassure them that we don’t make it our mission to crush their ego. I’ve decided that the most successful ways to provide feedback for the revision process are those that encourage thoughtful revision and that work alongside the elements only we can provide.

A New Unit and an Experiment

Now that my students and I are beginning a new writing unit, I wanted to try out the assistance of a digital revision tool, specifically Hemmingway Editor. Before doing this, I considered a few important steps:

1. I tried the writing assistance tool on my own writing first to get a feel for what it can and can’t do as well as to put myself in my students’ seat when it comes to having a piece of writing dissected like in this way.
2. I wanted to introduce them to this process with a low-stakes piece of writing. In this case, we had recently wrapped up the first quarter by choosing two prompts from this year’s Common App essay topics and writing a draft for each. If they can get a feel for how it works using something they can revise more easily, such as something about themselves, then using the tool with future topics will likely not be as daunting.
3. I would have to add some intentional teaching to prepare my students for the results, and I also modeled the process using a first draft of my own writing. This process of frontloading the detailed work makes the revision process more about them and less about me when the time comes. This will vary depending on the tool used, but for the Hemmingway App, we discussed passive voice, sentence variation and length, the use of adverbs, repetitive words and phrases, and how to make our own decisions as writers given the feedback we receive. This was more about equipping them to do the necessary thinking and decision making for their own revision than it was about teaching new concepts, although it was also another opportunity to openly talk about what makes “good writing” good.
4. They need to know what to do with the feedback they are given: This applies whether they’re using a writing assistance tool or not, but in a situation where I am not the one giving the feedback, the purpose of using these tools is to streamline the process while also giving them more power over their choices. Helping them navigate what to do next when they receive any kind of feedback will, again, teach them to be more independent with their writing process, freeing me up to facilitate where needed in the next steps rather than holding their hand during each step. Many tools help students identify areas of improvement in their writing, so by helping them build their own plan when sifting through the feedback, they will be able to continue to work at their own pace and problem-solve rather than waiting for me to teach them what to do once they see that they need more evidence, that they used too much passive voice, etc.

The Results?

Overall, my students’ feedback on the use of the tool was positive, which makes me feel better about adding it into our revision process for this and future units. Some of them worried that when revision took their “Readability” score to a lower grade level, they must have done something wrong. I explained to them that it’s simply something to take into consideration depending on their intended audience

Sarah* (student names have been changed) gave the tool a “solid 8/10” and said, “I noticed that this website does not like you to use the word ‘just.’ I used that word a lot, and they were encouraging me to use stronger words.” I was also impressed with Alan’s evaluation of his work using the tool because he said, “Some things in the piece that were asked to be removed for detracting from it felt like they were adding to it in many circumstances. Overall I think it’s a good tool, but I believe some things may be better staying outside of its recommendations.” This is what I was hoping for because my ultimate goal was to have students thinking critically about their own writing and make those decisions for themselves.

I never intended for writing assistance tools to replace what I do as a teacher, and I think we can all agree that no tool can come close to doing that. While it can save me from spending hours giving feedback, I can see now where the impersonal touch of a writing assistance tool has its place with the technical, “red pen” corrections, while preserving our energy and allowing us the pleasure of providing the irreplaceable personal feedback no algorithm can replace.