What can you do with negative feedback?

Instead of getting depressed or extremely angry because of the comments you find in your text, try to put a reasonable distance between your feelings and the professional work you’re doing.

Read each comment, analyze it, and if you don’t understand it, meet the editor and ask for explanation. Without a doubt, if the person editing has the necessary education and experience, he’ll be able to back his comments up, and he’ll even be able to teach you a few things. Prepare to listen to explanations, solid arguments, and justified decisions that are backed by reasonable arguments.

Listen, consider, analyze. Don’t flat out reject everything: propose. The final goal is to find solutions, not to hover over the problems.

When the process is finally over, your way of seeing the world may be changed. Your ego may soften and you might end up with a text that’s far more satisfactory than that exciting first version. 

What happened to your masterpiece, your perfect manuscript, your door to an award, a Pulitzer or even a Nobel?

After that first positive emotion, you start feeling sad, and that sadness gradually turns into anger and then you feel outraged. The problem gets worse if you start to see some truth into the comments written into your work. “Am I really this ignorant? How could I make so many mistakes? Why had I never heard about this before?  Why did I have to get embarrassed like this? Is this truly how things are?”...

Each comment on the page turns into agony. Each one reminds you that you failed and it hurts your ego, the thing that gets hurt the most in the process. You get sad and depressed, you feel like your stomach is empty and you wish you had never been born, or that you had never written anything.

To make matters worse, the manuscript can’t just lie there. There’s a contract, a commitment, a deadline. They expect you to solve all doubts, to approve or reject changes, to expand concepts and to clean the manuscript to take it to the next stage. 

My text was corrected: How do I interpret the comments?

You finally got to the last word. You write it and feel triumphant. Adrenaline rushes through your body, and you think your text is good, no matter what. You are proud, happy, and you feel successful. You can’t wait to send it to the editor. What will the editor say? You’re expecting praise, congratulations, patting. You hear the “Very good!” in your head, over and over.

In the meantime, that other person receives the material and takes his time to read it. It seems to be taking forever. Why hasn’t he sent it back already? Why isn’t he saying something? I already did my part, now I want him to do his. 

The manuscript comes back days, weeks or months later. But, what a surprise! Instead of getting congratulations, praise, wonder or being recognized as a genius, you find a manuscript filled with corrections: “Missing a page number”, “commonplace”, “empty expression”, “confusing”, “expand this”, “clarify this”, “contradiction”, “epistemological problem”, “check meaning”...

You find multiple words that are crossed out, new commas where you didn’t imagine there would be any, hundreds of syntax changes, new paragraphs, dissected paragraphs, and changes of order, annotations to include things you hadn’t foreseen, new sections or whole sections eliminated.

Evaluation

Evaluation must be done following criteria of learning and improving, which require a permanent actualization of knowledge, for both students and teachers. In this respect, evaluation is a continuous process that seeks to understand the state of the educational processes and, starting from these, to identify the weaknesses and plan strategies of improvement. Thus, it is necessary to make pedagogical interventions that coordinate students and critical writers, which permit a communicative, comprehensive, critical relation. This way, students learn to learn how to evaluate themselves, so, once again, social cognitive and metacognitive strategies gain importance.

Actually, in evaluation the most important is the declarative knowledge (information about the world, the language, etc.) and procedural knowledge related to reading and writing, excluding the order of states and actions, i.e., of knowing about and knowing how, which is strategically applied in pedagogical interventions. These include in particular the social and cognitive strategies that make a person. These include the social and cognitive strategies that a person needs to perform a determined task.

In conclusion, learning to read and write is part of the communicative skills, while all skills are products of the coordination of multiple knowledge. Therefore, evaluation must exclusively address the competencies and should specify the evolution of the student in developing them.

Communicative skills and the evaluation of the reading and writing processes

For Gumperz and Hymes (1982:209), from the point of view of interaction, communicative skills can be defined as: “knowledge of linguistic and communicative conventions in general, that speakers must possess in order to create and maintain a conversational cooperation.” Saville Troike (1989, 1982:21) states that: “Communication skills imply knowledge not only about the linguistic code, but also about what and how to relay a message in an appropriate manner, whatever the given situation. This relates to the social and cultural knowledge of the speakers, which allows them to use and interpret the linguistic forms.

In Colombia, researchers like María Cristina Torrado, Guillermo Bustamante, Sergio Tobón and Eduardo Serrano have studied the concept of skill. From this pint of view, the context and the situation in which the competence develops constitute the dialogical unity that puts knowing above being, knowing how to do and being able to do it, which is the ultimate goal of the comprehensive social education at the University.

Vygotsky’s theory

Vygotsky’s theory proves highly relevant for education in general, and for the processes of reading and writing in particular. To the same extent are relevant the contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches about teaching writing, formulated by researchers like Anna Camps, Teresa Colomer, Daniel Cassany, Isabel Solé, Gladys Stella López, Delia Lerner, María Teresa Serafini, Josette Jolibert, Luis Ángel Baena, Gloria Rincón, María Cristina Martínez, Fabio Jurado, Mauricio Pérez Abril and others.

The authors mentioned above all formulated the same basic criteria for the teaching of writing and reading:

• Types of discourses should be approached according to the students’ necessities.
• In order to learn how to write, it is essential that students have access in the classroom to model texts that will serve as references for their own works.
• After focusing on the text as a product, it is necessary to perceive the production of texts as a process, so the teacher has the duty to allow time for planning, textualization and revision, and offer support in each of these stages.
• Learning about the processes of reading and writing implies a permanent process of metacognition.
• It is necessary to acknowledge the “teachability” of the processes of reading and writing, as these don’t appear spontaneously, nor in time, as we age, nor as we pass from one school year to another.
• It is essential to insist on the necessity to make pedagogical interventions meant to improve the complex processes of constructing the meaning, developing different types of strategies (cognitive, metacognitive, ludic, etc.) that stimulate the development of communicative skills.

Therefore, we must say that the teaching strategies, as defined by Mayer (cited by Díaz, 1999) are “the procedures of resources used by the agent of teaching in order to promote significant learning,” while learning strategies are defined as “a series of helpers inside the student; these decide when and why to apply them, to learn, remember and use the information.”

Skills to interpret academic texts

It is a common fact that students take part in various social activities of reading and writing that require their familiarization with different types of discourses. Thus, given the conditions presented in this proposal, we must highlight the focus on the development of competencies that will allow students to interpret academic texts and produce different types of discourses, characteristic for the academic university education, such as: the summary, the review, the essay, analysis, report, protocol, record, statement and cover letters, etc.

Teaching and learning of reading and writing

Nowadays, a subject is seen as an active and constructive agent of their own knowledge, due to the contributions brought by different disciplines to language sciences, pedagogy and didactics, which have made room for new and diverse tendencies. From the advent of the socio-constructivist direction, these tendencies have offered points of reference and explanation of the processes of teaching and learning, which put forth modern pedagogical and didactic alternatives that come to face the requirements and changes that the contemporary society demands from its professionals and from education in general.

According to Coll (1995:508), the socio-constructivist conception of teaching and writing starts from the obvious fact that school presents students the aspects of culture that are fundamental for their personal development, beyond the cognitive environment; education is the engine of development in a global meaning, which also implies the abilities of personal equilibrium, social insertion and inter-personal relations.

This is how the explanatory referential marker allows the integration of apparently different positions, such as those of Piaget, Vygotsky, Ausubel and others, as none of them opposes the access to culture and individual development. On the contrary, they understand that the development of a person depends on the cultural background in which he is immersed, and, therefore, it is built, but it also learns (and it is taught) how to build itself. Culture is perceived now as a semiotic process of interpretation and construction of signs, as  Clifford Geertz states.