Peer Review

Peer Review of Student Writing

Peer review is an important process for understanding how your audience receives and understands your writing. Many professional writers use peer reviews multiple times as an important part of their writing process and the development of the final published product. The review of an editor is essentially a peer review.

In this class, we will be doing peer review in class. We will not be peer reviewing all written assignments. For all writing assignments, I encourage you to form peer review groups outside of class—each group can be responsible for setting a deadline for a draft of the paper. The group can then gather for an hour or hour and a half, during which the group follows the process that we follow in class (described below). From that peer review session, each student would revise their paper for submission for the assignment. (Note: this would require pre-planning among group members—which is strongly encouraged. You will be surprised how much this process will improve your writing.)

We will follow the following peer-review process in class. I encourage you to follow the same process in your outside-of-class groups:

• Group members take a sheet of paper, which they divide into three columns:
  • + = aspects of the draft for which they had positive reactions and which worked well, where the logic was clear and the arguments were understood
  • – = aspects of the draft that worked less well or where they had negative reactions (such as not understanding logic or argument, or not agreeing with something)
  • ? = questions that occurred while listening, such as places that need clarification or more development
• The writer reads the draft out loud to the group.
• After the writer reads their paper out loud, the group takes a few minutes to make notes in each column of the paper. The writer also does this, noting where she thought her writing was not well-described (which is often easier to identify when one has read the paper aloud).
• After a few minutes, each group member, in turn, explains to the writer what she found effective or ineffective, what parts were clear, what parts were confusing, and so forth. (Important note: group members do not give advice on how to change writing, but rather simply describe their personal responses to the draft as written.)
• The writer takes notes during each response, but does not enter into a discussion. The writer listens, but does not defend the piece or explain “what I meant”—save the “what I meant” for figuring out who to revise the writing to explain better what was meant. Remember that, when someone says “I didn’t understand,” then the writing didn’t convey in a way that could be understood by the listener.
• After each group member has responded to a writer’s essay, the next group member reads her essay and the cycle repeats, until all in the group have read their paper and all have heard each audience member responses.