Author’s Comment—Sarah Warshauer Freedman

This study comes from my dissertation on the evaluation of student writing. I think I cared and still care about that topic because when I reached a stage where I consciously wanted to write better (I think not until I was an M.A. student in English literature at The University of Chicago), I realized that what was stopping me and what had always stopped me from being able to improve my writing was my inability to articulate what made some pieces I wrote better than others. And my teachers’ comments never seemed to help me very much. By studying texts and teachers’ judgments, I thought, I would be able to find some clues to what good writing was.