Other educators' thoughts on the value of responding to student writing

The environment needs to be supportive and non-threatening.
The teacher needs to develop a community of writers.
An audience gives purpose for writing and a wider range of next step comments.
Comments should be specific and immediate.
Students can be trained to give effective comments - taking the entire responsibility for constructive comments off the teacher.
Evidence of achieved success criteria across a range of pieces can be tracked and recorded.
Blog posts are shorter pieces to edit and comment on but still give evidence of targets achieved and editing completed.
Concrete examples of next steps helps student editing.

http://patue.teachercast.net/responding-to-student-writing-chat-archive/