Responding - Really Responding to Other Student's Writing

This is an article about students responding to other student's writing. It is about students editing and proofreading other students' writing. The article outlines how you should respond to someone's writing from a position other than a teacher. The author says that responding to a paper that someone has written and asked you to look over or the teacher asked you to look over is not just an assignment. When reading someone's writing, you need to actually read it and look for errors and look for things that would hurt there grade and stand out to the teacher. Above all the fixing of the errors and the grammar checks and finding problems to help improve someone's grade, you should look at the content and read the story. You should ask questions about the story, ask the reader why he/she did or did not include some things in their writing. You want to get the writer to understand why they have written what they did. Your goal is to help them improve their writing, but at the same time challenge them in what they have written. The author gives different steps for the reader/proofreader to achieve these goals. First, you need to understand what your goals are in reading the paper and understand what your role is when reading the paper. You need to know exactly what to address in the writing and where you should put your comments. Where does the writer and/or reader prefer that you put your comments. You need to make sure that you sound like a friend reading a friend's paper, not a teacher grading it. Make sure that you have a plan for how much to comment on the writing. One important thing that the author includes in the article of advice is to know who your writer is. You should take in to account who the writer is and their style, but not let it take over your comments and affect your feedback to the writer.
The writer gives good points for why they believe that their steps for responding to student's writing really works. With each step that they give, they explain why it is important and what will be missing from your response if this is not included. The writer seems to know a lot about commenting and it shows in this article and in each step/instruction for responding.
I agree with certain parts of the authors advice for responding to other student's writing. The part where he says that most of the time, it isn't good to be short and sweet and that you need to elaborate on the comments may not be true 100% of the time, in my opinion. I think that sometimes you need to just get to the point and not put a bunch of useless comments that the writer doesn't need to see. Other than this particular section, I think that the writer was very solid in his advice and I agree with it. I think that if we follow most of these instructions  then it will result in a very well written response to the writer about how to improve their paper.
The golden line that I have taken away is: "But say you want to do a good job. Say you are willing to put in the time and effort-though time is tight and you know it's not going to be easy-and help the writer look back on the paper and revise it." (pg. 136)