“I love reading final research papers at the end of the semester,” a biology instructor mentioned to me recently at a staff meeting I attended. “They always fill in some gap in my knowledge. They teach me something.” A week later, I ran into a folklore instructor sitting on the terrace on a Friday afternoon, accompanied by a cup of coffee and a stack of papers. “I’m so excited about these papers,” she said when she saw me. “They are amazing. My students are bringing together so many new ideas!”

Perhaps there was more than just coffee in her coffee. Or perhaps these two instructors just happened to luck out and get the “good” writers in their classes. And maybe, too, they felt differently when they reached the bottom of their stacks. More likely, however, both the coffee and the writers were of the run-of-the mill, supermarket variety. How, then, do these instructors muster so much genuine enthusiasm? How might the rest of us look forward to, as opposed to dread, reading student writing?

When we read, we choose from many possible roles in relation to student writing. In a classic guide for writing tutors, Donald McAndrew and Thomas Reigstad name just a few—cheerleader, editor, therapist, expert, and error-corrector. Sometimes we choose these roles consciously, offering students the kind of feedback we think they need to meet our pedagogical goals. At other times, we fall back into old habits. As writing scholar Edward White points out, we often unreflectively model our teaching behavior on what our past teachers did.

I want to advocate that we expand our repertoire of roles to include one we often play when we read papers written by all kinds of writers except our students—that of the interested reader, a reader who wants to learn something and who wants to be changed by what she learns. Being an interested reader does not mean being soft or uncritical. Quite the opposite. It requires a high level of engagement that can pay off in both improving student writing and making the work of reading more meaningful and fun.

Here are some tips for how to achieve that special glow exhibited by the biology and folklore instructors above, while maintaining high standards for student writing.

Design an assignment that asks students to solve a problem.
The first step to becoming an interested reader is to design assignments that allow students to become interesting writers. Most often, undergrads are put in the position of writing to an audience of faculty who are specialists in their field. As novices, they face the daunting, and even artificial, rhetorical situation of having to write with authority to the authorities.

Writing tasks that ask for a genuine contribution by students, on the other hand, increase their motivation and critical thinking, and open the possibility that you might learn something from their writing. Such tasks often do not have a pre-scripted answer. Or if they do, students are asked to focus on the process of solving the problem, instead of on the final result.

I’ve taken a few examples of such assignments from John Bean’s Engaging Ideas, an excellent resource for faculty in all disciplines. Among many other suggestions, he proposes that you might:

• Develop scenarios that place students in realistic situations relevant to your discipline, for which they must reach a decision to resolve a conflict.
  
  
• Think of controversial claims in your field that students must support or critique.
  
  
• Think of tasks that allow students to link concepts in your course to their personal experience or prior knowledge.
  
  

Read student writing as a reader.
Reading as a reader means viewing student writing as an act of communication, as opposed to a static artifact waiting to be judged. From this perspective, the salient question to ask as we read is this: what is this writer trying to communicate to me? This question helps us to celebrate each writer’s moments of insight, as well as to think about what he meant by the seemingly garbled analysis at the end of that last paragraph. In other words, we become active readers of student texts—asking questions about why a student focused on one point as opposed to another, letting ourselves become intrigued by an unusual claim, or wondering about the significance of what might at first glance seem to be a tangent. Such a perspective can allow instructors a more holistic picture of a writer who is wrestling with a complex issue.

What might such an interaction look like in practical terms?

Your comments on a first draft or in a conference might continue and elaborate on the conversation you invited the writer into when you asked him to solve a genuine problem. It is also not a bad idea to let students know explicitly that this is your aim. I try to say something along these lines: “The comments I wrote on your papers were meant to give you a sense of how I was responding to your paper as a reader—ideas I was intrigued by, where I was confused, what I wanted to hear more about.” After this preface, I have found that students trust the authenticity of my questions, not assuming they are prescriptive. They often reply with astute and insightful responses to the following types of written or oral comments:

• Interesting point here. How did you choose to emphasize point x instead of point z?
  
  
• You took the thesis in an unusual direction. I think I see what you’re getting at, but I’d love to hear more.
  
  
• I’m not sure I follow here. I see that you’re connecting point x and y, but I’m curious to know more precisely how you see them working together.
  
  
• I think you might really be on to something here, because . . .
  
  

Each of these comments aims to elicit further communication. As an instructor, I want to find out what a particular writer has to say, and I try to respond in a way that invites her to say it. This individualized, communicative approach not only eases our disappointment when students inevitably fail to live up the Platonic ideal of academic writing that we all hold dear, but also helps students see their writing as interacting with a real reader, which, as research on peer review and other dialogic classroom practices shows, improves student writing. Moreover, as a Harvard study puts it, such feedback can help students at a large university, such as ours, feel “seen and heard.”

Of course, it is painfully clear to us and to our students that what separates professors from “real readers” of their writing is the power professors wield in the form of grades. Good evaluation, however, can also grow out of the “interested reader” perspective. We might think about evaluating students in a readerly way. We might ask: Did this piece of writing teach me something? Did it communicate a clear and interesting take on the course material? In other words, did it work as a communicative act?

Such an approach might not be appropriate for all stages of all assignments. But it is a worthwhile role to add to our repertoires. And who knows what the results could be? You might find yourself grinning ear to ear as you read through a stack of papers on a Friday afternoon at the terrace.