Feedback Focus

Or, Teachers hate her! Girl's one weird trick to reading comprehension.

One of these three feedback strategies is, in my opinion, vastly superior to the other two.

First, the two that fall flat:

Copy and delete, aka reading by paragraph. This method discourages reading and critiquing the work as a whole when used on its own, in my opinion. When combined with one of the two other methods, it could work as part of a system. On its own, though, it only leads to a lot of half-baked thoughts, and fragmented comments and critiques. Worst of all, it stunts the commenting process unnecessarily. It could be useful for drawing more attention to the technical and/or stylistic choices of a story, especially a longer one; however, the other two techniques do the same with more efficiency.

Use a timer, aka timed re-reading. Obviously, most people will do this automatically when formulating a critique--it's hard to write a fully-formed comment without at least skimming some parts of the story again. I do it to revisit particularly good or particularly problematic sections in a story. When reading Zoology 1114, I had time to read the full story, sans author's note, about three times. I didn't find much that I hadn't seen before. Again, this could be useful in conjunction with one of the other two techniques, but the addition of a ten minute timer won't do much for those who already re-read in their commenting process.

Lastly, the one that works:

Reading out loud. But, this one has a stipulation: read it to someone. Preferably someone human. I read the story "Why Dog and Cat Are Enemies" to my roommates. Reading out loud is completely different than reading to yourself--if you're putting any effort into changing up your inflection or creating emotion for the story, you have to infer what parts of it to emphasize in order to make it entertaining for your audience. And, as a huge added bonus, you can discuss the story after you read it, which is a built-in guarantee that you'll have something to comment on.

Note: the above is just my opinion, of course, and if someone reads this and violently disagrees, that's great--hopefully other people have the capacity to use the two techniques I disliked. I wish I could make better use of them, too.

Image: Reading Upside Down by Garry Knight