Chapter Description

Praise is an important element of peer and teacher feedback—it can, to quote Donald Daiker, “lift the hearts, as well as the pens” of student au- thors—but substantive praise is one of the most challenging modes of feedback to compose (112). How can writing instructors move student re- sponders beyond standard comments such as “Great paper!” or “I liked it” or “Good details”? This chapter is a guide for students in composition classes, and aims to help them understand the importance of giving and receiving detailed, conversational praise; it presents scenarios for conceptu- alizing how to write praise, provides sample student writing excerpts that invite students to practice writing praise, offers and analyzes examples of different types of student-authored praise comments, and provides an array of approaches to writing praise comments.