Making writing assessment meaningful

One of the most important concepts we teach in our technical writing classes is audience analysis-who the audience members are, what they do, what they need from the writer to do their job. These concepts also apply to grading student assignments. In addition to an assessment of their performance on an assignment, the students need feedback that would help them learn and help them improve their performance. In addition, perhaps most important, they need to "buy into" the evaluation so they will accept and use the feedback rather than dismiss it as being nothing more than "the teacher's opinion". That analysis led the author to the practice she has been gradually incorporating in all her classes: student generation of evaluation criteria for each writing assignment. The author describes the procedure and enumerates what she considers to be its strengths.