This past Wednesday, I had the privilege of participating in an engaging discussion with House Fellow Cynthia Hill. To begin the discussion, Mrs. Hill began with holding up cards to show common corrections that we see on papers; from ‘awk’ to the dreaded ‘?’ nearly all of the symbols were familiar to me as something that I have seen on a paper I get back from professors and teachers throughout my academic career.

I never really considered analyzing what these symbols really meant. What does a check exemplify? Good? Average? Decent? What do you do when you receive an “awk”? Mrs. Hill went on to explain that a lot of what we see from written feedback is how the person is framing what they expect from us and from our writing. We also talked about the use of rubrics and how we utilize rubrics when we get them from an instructor. For the majority of us, a rubric is almost a godsend; it provides us with the necessary criteria that we know we have to put in our papers.

Mrs. Hill’s facilitation of this interesting topic really made me think about the elements of writing a paper and how to interpret feedback. Sometimes, when we see that we received the grade we wanted, we don’t even bother to look at the feedback that our professors may have provided. After this talk, I’m a little more cognizant of the value of feedback and that it’s okay to question the different vague symbols used.