I recently attended a new faculty seminar at my university, at which everyone was asked to describe a person or event that had led us into the field of teaching. Our seminar leader began by sharing his experience in attempting to publish his first paper. He described receiving his draft from his dissertation advisor and being horrified initially to find it covered in red ink with “not a line untouched.” But after reading through the comments, he was struck with a feeling of amazement that his advisor had cared enough about his work to so fully invest his interest and time in responding to the draft. As we worked our way around the seminar room, one of my new colleagues shared another story that seemed to counter the paper-saturated-in-red-ink story that had begun the discussion. He described an English teacher who wrote next to nothing on his papers. Despite his initial disappointment at not receiving the feedback he had wanted and expected, he found that the teacher's minimal response had freed him to write and given him a sense of independence that eventually led him to believe in his own writing. These two stories interested me because they illustrated such dramatically different approaches to teaching and responding to writing, yet had equally strong, positive impacts on the writers.

Just over a decade ago, Reid (1994) examined what she called the “myths of appropriation” – the seeming dichotomy of under-responding and over-responding to texts, specifically addressing the prevailing fear of taking away ownership of, or appropriating, students' writing. In the time since Reid's article, the term appropriation has not disappeared from discussions of feedback.