To what extent do faculty discuss referees' reports with their students?
Most of our students, I think, assume that once you become a professor, your writing somehow transcends evaluation. We grade, as it were, from on high. Oh, there are the student evaluations of our teaching, but our prose? That's a different matter. It's the rare student who looks up reviews of her professors' books in the scholarly journals, but it's the even rarer student in the humanities (the STEM fields may be different) who hears much about responding to peer reviewers.
I occasionally insert my own undergraduate prose into the classroom as practice for peer workshopping. "It's a real paper," I say. "How would you advise this student?" (As it happens, the sample paper I use got a higher grade than I would have given it myself; such is life.) This produces some anxious tittering at the moment of the big reveal, but the underlying point is simple: look, nobody emerges from Zeus' head writing brilliant academic essays. Even professors spend their undergraduate careers looking for a thesis in all the wrong places, neglecting to append a conclusion, or dangling their modifiers every which way.
However, the undergraduate example still positions professor-me as "all grown up." My theses are informative! The conclusions conclude! And the modifiers are not dangling, let alone squinting! Yet at the grand old age of 41, I still have a hard time writing introductions (endings are easier). Speaking of which, I just fixed a dangling modifier in the forthcoming introduction to Robert Elsmere. Moreover, peer reviewers tell me to change things, and...well...I have to change them. (In his or her final suggestions for Book Two, the second-round peer reviewer gently pointed out that I hadn't done something s/he had requested the first time around. Guess what I was doing this morning?) I grumble loudly, but nevertheless, there we are. I may not be receiving letter grades, but the comments are still there. We, too, are subject to judgment.
Yes. Joint authorship changes things. Referees usually won't call out the writing itself unless it's atrociously bad. On the other hand, good writing makes it easier to get one's papers accepted.
Posted by: plam | October 20, 2012 at 11:19 AM
I have some friends, especially but not exclusively rhet/comp folks, who explicitly position themselves in class as working writers, struggling with some of the same kinds of problems.
How well this works probably depends a bit on the ethos of the instructor!
Posted by: JBJ | October 20, 2012 at 12:25 PM