Review
You’ve no doubt done plenty of peer reviews. But what percentage of the comments that you gave were actually addressed? You’ll be happy/dismayed to know that your peers almost always follow the correctives (pointing out errors). More substantial argumentative or rhetorical comments, on the other hand, are often ignored. Research has affirmed this. If you write 50 comments pointing out style and grammar issues and 2 comments about the rhetorical or argumentative stance, the author will see it as a matter of scale and think the “mistakes” are more important than the comment that pointed out the massive logic error in the argument. It’s obviously not just about the scale—as writers, we all know that fixing a comma error is far easier than fixing that error in logic or a rhetorical oversight. In the end, however, a flawed argument is more problematic than a few comma errors.
This week, you will be reviewing your peers’ Revisions. As experts in writing practices, you should understand a bit about what peer review comments work. Here are some things to recognize as you comment now and in the future.
First, here are the top four LEAST helpful comments:
- One word, negative comments (e.g., unclear, awkward, wrong) (Hayes & Daiker, 1984; Straub, 1997)
- Vague or general comments (Weaver, 2006; Straub, 1997)
- Lack of guidance or suggestions (Weaver, 2006)
- Comments not connected to assessment criteria (Weaver, 2006; Carless, 2006)
The first two directly feed into #3—lack of guidance. Whether a positive “this is good” or a negative “this is bad,” without pointing to a direct instance, and offering direct suggestion, the comment isn’t very helpful. Offering suggestions can be hard. You have to shift from left brain analytical to right brain creative, and it can be taxing. As you could surmise from the above list, here are the top four MOST helpful comments:
- Positive comments and reinforcement (Hayes & Daiker, 1984; Weaver, 2006; Dragga, 1985; Ferris, 2014)
- Constructive comments, suggestions (Calhoon-Dillahunt & Forrest, 2013).
- Corrections (Straub, 1997)
- Negative comments from experts to experts (Finkelstein & Fishbach, 2011)
What peer review ultimately does is allow an authentic reader to respond to a piece of writing. It’s not about expert writing advice and “fixing” writers—it’s about responding how a reader would respond.
How do you do a peer review?
- Read the whole piece first without comment. It’s tempting to think you are saving time, but you aren’t. Sit down and read the whole thing first to see where it goes, what patterns develop, and what the author really needs to know.
- Tell the writer what they did well. Maybe this is a sentence, but maybe it is more. This claim should be supported with evidence. Not, “Great sentence” but instead, “great sentence; your details about the little house made me feel like I was there.”
- Provide suggestions to the writer—give examples, things to consider, or how you would have approached an issue, but leave it up to them to decide how to use your examples. Don’t just cross something out and write something new.
- Remember there is a person behind the writing who has spent hours working on the project. They want help improving. Comment about the writing’s effectiveness.
- Be brave. Sometimes writers say things that you find objectionable. Be mindful especially when confronted with examples and idioms of race, gender, and sexuality. It’s not about being the PC police—it’s about making sure the writing remains meaningful for its intended audience. Let writers know when something might be objectionable, even if you qualify it with how you felt as a reader; for example, you might write, “while some might find the line ‘fat goth chicks’ funny, it made me angry as a reader. Maybe the line would work better if you just said ‘mascara clad goths’ or ‘awkward goth kids’.”
- Save grammar fixing for the last. If you notice patterns, then point them out, and feel free to mark individual errors as you see fit, but if you spend an hour just fixing comma errors then you aren’t peer reviewing as a reader–you are editing.
There are a lot of models for doing peer review including small-team collaborations, group review, and round robin style exchanges. Each has benefits. For the Revision and the Portfolio reviews, we are going to do collaborative reviews. What that means is that you are going to receive three reviews written on the same document, 1 from your professor and 2 from your peers. You will then have to decide what to do with these reviews (Module 9 is all about how to decide).
For the Revision assignment, you will be doing a mostly holistic peer review. It is holistic because you will read the works as a reader would, on the whole, and provide general impressions about what worked or didn’t work. It is “mostly” because you should also look at the RGA (included at the end of each document) to make sure the authors emulated the genre markers they say they are in the Revision.
This week is all about reviewing your peers and figuring out what to do with their feedback.
Design this week
- Revision [email richard.colby@du.edu]