4 Ways to Help a Writer through Peer Review

Dr. Eric Drown 1. Help her find her essential questions, ideas, and interests in the paper. What does the paper seem to want to be about or to say? 2. Help him develop his essential ideas by making them more complex, clearer, more easily understood, or by putting them in dialogue with the ideas of another writer. 3. Help her evaluate the aptness of her choice of materials (sources, concepts, examples, passages, lines of thought) from the readings. Help her evaluate her use of the materials. Has she gotten the most out of them? Are their elements of the materials that could spur thought? Are there other better or more suggestive materials that could be used instead? 4. Help the writer decide what couple of things to work on going forward in the time available for revision. Where should the writer spend his time and energy? Which parts of the essay can be cut? What changes would most benefit a third party reader? Useful Comment Templates for Reviewers I think your paper wants to be about ______. Your essential questions are ______. Your argument is that ______. You have two main claims, a) ______, and b) ______. You support your claims with the following evidence: ______. To me, your argument ______. Your argument seems to be a response to ______, who argues ______. In reply, you say ______. I think ______. It seems that you agree with ______, who writes ______. Like him/her, you think ______. You could take your agreement farther and say ______. It seems that you disagree with ______, who writes ______. Unlike him/her, you think ______. The roots of your disagreement seem to lie in your different views of ______. I want to better understand what you mean when you write ______. What II think youre saying is ______. You could also say ______. Someone else might say ______. The passage from ______, which you discuss on p. #, seems useful/confusing/ problematic/revealing/______, because ______. I think the following passage (______) from ______ could really help you when you write about ______. In particular the section of the passage about ______ seems particularly relevant to your concerns about ______. Heres how I think you could apply the idea that ______[summary of useful idea]: ______ [way to use it].