CONCISENESS

EXERCISE IV

Reducing Monica's summary

This study went through 1,600 marginal and end comments written on 110 first drafts of essays by 47 university ESL advanced students, considering the pragmatic goals and the linguistics features of each comment. Then, drafts of each essay were examined to observe the influence of the first draft commentary on the revisions and assess whether changes that were made in response to teacher's feedback improved the essays. The author thinks a significant proportion of the comments led to substantive student revision, and that particular types and forms of commentary were more helpful than others. The final results are suggestive of important implications for L2 writing instrution and future studies on a vital surprisingly neglected topic.