Peer Review Worksheet and Letter

Before completing this assignment, please review the studies and discussion prompts.

Introduction

Here are some guidelines for giving and receiving great peer feedback:

• Be sure you have identified the writer’s goals before you begin generating your feedback. This will ensure that your comments are relevant and focused on helping the writer achieve what he or she hopes to achieve.
• Discuss the text, not the emotions surrounding the text. Good givers of feedback look for elements and aspects of the text that work, and point out aspects and elements that do not quite communicate the ideas in the text. Remember to refer back to the writer’s goals, and comment on those. Which aspects of the text are functioning to achieve those goals, and which aren’t? Explain why.
• Be clear. Be direct. Be specific.
• When you find areas you think need improvement, offer suggestions for how the writer might go about doing this. You probably won’t always have specific suggestions, but do the best you can. Sometimes simply providing a clear explanation for why something doesn’t seem to be working is enough to spark ideas when the writer reads your comments. It’s also helpful to direct the writer to resources you think might be useful.
• Tone, language, word choices, and grammatical issues that inhibit a reader’s ability to understand a writer’s meaning are also important areas for the peer reviewer to consider. Writers don’t always know how their tone will come across to a reader, so a peer reviewer’s perspective is extremely important if there are any significant problems with tone or language choices in the text. It’s also helpful to point out areas with awkward syntax or tedious repetition; these are things that writers have difficulty spotting in their own writing.

The experience of peer review will also help you become a better critical reader of your own writing. You’ll find that as you learn how to analyze and critique the writing of others, you’ll also develop the ability to apply these same skills to your own writing.

Instructions

For this assignment, submit the Peer Review Worksheet and accompanying letter to your peer that you completed for this unit’s discussion.

Your assignment will be scored on the following criteria:

1. Explain the main strengths of the research paper.
2. Assess the utility, applicability, and sufficiency of the supporting evidence.
3. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of the text’s organization.
4. Assess editing concerns regarding the research paper.
5. Recommend issues the author should prioritize for revision.

Resources