Topic Peer Review
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Transcript of Topic Peer Review
© 2015 Brian N. Larson Topic: Peer review Page 1
Topic: Peer review This topic page includes introductory information, a list of readings, and questions to guide your reading and prepare you for class discussion; it may also include an individual or group assignment, which may or may not be graded.
Introduction Many times during this semester, you will be called on to provide a peer review to a classmate on a project or part of a project. You will also receive a peer review on each such project. Peer review provides two very different pedagogical benefits:
1. Getting feedback from another audience on your communications is a good way to improve your project.
2. Learning how to review someone else’s communication and give constructive feedback on it is excellent training for being able to review your own communications and edit them yourself. The act of reviewing many communications by many other authors can help you to distance yourself from the texts1 you review, so that when you look over your own communications, you can approach them with some detachment.
Readings for this topic Read the following entries in Alred, Brusaw and Oliu (2015; “ABO”).
• “revision” (including the Digital Tip: Incorporating Tracked Changes on p. 504) • “proofreading”
Breuch, L.K. (2010). Peer review tutorial. (Available in the resources tab on T-‐Square.)
Reading questions While reading ABO, consider the following thoughts:
• ABO describes three stages of proofreading, “First-‐stage,” “Second-‐stage,” and “Final-‐stage” review. Larson has problems with this on two levels. First, it suggests there are three stages, when in fact there may be one or five (or any other number of) stages. Second, it places the “Survey of your overall goals: audience needs and purpose” in the final stage. But Larson strongly suggests the following process for proofreading your own papers and those of others:
o First: Look at whether the text is structured so as to meet the needs of the audience in this rhetorical situation. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” means not to worry about the details. If the text fails overall to achieve its purpose, no amount of editing of grammar, usage, and punctuation will fix it; and as it would need to be revised significantly, the copyediting could be wasted if edited text is later deleted or completely rewritten.
o Second: Look at the mid-‐level organization (if the document is written in prose). Does every paragraph have an apparent purpose? Does it provide support for that purpose? If the document is in another mode (video, let’s say), do its larger parts
1 Construing that term broadly to include multimodal texts.
© 2015 Brian N. Larson Topic: Peer review Page 2
contribute to the overall message—do they advance the author’s purpose in the rhetorical situation?
o Third: Look at the details. If the higher-‐level issues (rhetorical purpose, organization, paragraph structure, etc.) are well-‐addressed, then invest time in correcting typos or identifying minor stylistic problems.
• For this class, you should know how to proofread a document using Microsoft Word’s comment and track-‐changes functions and using markup features of a software package that can read and edit PDF files. If you do not know how to do these things, you should do a web search to find instructions appropriate for the software on your computer.
When reading the Breuch guidelines for peer review, keep in mind the following:
• You may be reviewing a text from another student that is not in Microsoft Word, so don’t always expect to be able to use Word’s features for peer review.
• Some of the menu selections in this essay are outdated and don’t work with newer versions of Word or versions on Windows vs. Mac. You can always find instructions for your software by doing a web search.
Classroom activities for this topic None.
Assignments for this topic None.
Works cited Alred, G. J., Brusaw, C. T., & Oliu, W. E. (2015). Handbook of Technical Writing (11th edition).
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.