Peer Review Instructions
Each member of the group should have a peer review sheet. Fill out your own name in the blank
that says "Author's name," and fill out the names of your two group members' names where it
says "Peer responders." The sheet that I gave to you is for you to fill out when it is your turn to
have your essay discussed. You should not write about anyone else's essay on the sheet that is
yours.
Once your group has three members, you should go through the following process:
1. Decide who is going to have his or her essay discussed first. That person should give
copies of his or her essay to the other two members of the group. While the first group
member's essay is being read, that person should be reading the next essay that is going to
be discussed.
2. Read the first essay silently. Feel free to make notes in the margin, write questions in the
margin, and annotate the essay as you did the reading that we practiced in class. Also,
you should feel free to mark any very obvious grammatical or spelling errors that you
notice, but please remember that it is not your job to edit your group members' paper for
them. Instead, your markings should focus on content and meaning.
3. When everyone has read the first paper, come together as a group and discuss it. This
means that everyone in the group should be participating in the discussion. The author
should lead the discussion and record the answers to the Peer Review sheet questions on
his or her own sheet.
4. Remember to be specific and detailed in your comments if you are reviewing. If you are
the author, ask for clarification if you need it and suggest possible solutions to problems
your group points out.
5. When the group has finished thoroughly discussing the first essay and the author has his
or her Peer Review sheet entirely filled out (this sheet must be attached to your final draft
of the essay and thoughtfully filled out in order to receive credit), you should move on to
the next essay. Repeat this process until everyone has had his or her paper read and
discussed.
If your group is done with the entire peer review process and you have spent less than
thirty minutes per group member, you are not actually done. You need to go back and
have a more in-depth discussion about the essays you have written.
If you finish before class time is over, you may want to do the following:
Work on homework for next class.
Begin to make some of the revisions that your peer group suggested.
Write an entry for your revision log.
If a rough draft is due for instructor comments, make sure that I have one copy of your
essay before you leave class!
Revision Logs
As we go through the writing process, we make changes to our writing. We polish, we improve,
we delete, we add. A revision log can help us to decide what changes are needed and help to
guide us through the process.
For every take-home writing assignment, you must turn in a revision log. It must be clearly
labeled at the top of the page as your revision log. The log must have AT LEAST two entries,
though it may have more.
The first required entry –
Must be made after your peer review for each piece.
Should reflect on your peer editing group's advice.
Should discuss what goals you have for your revision.
The second required entry –
Must be made after you have made your revisions.
Should discuss the changes you made and how they have improved your piece.
Note: Do not turn in revision log entries that consist of nothing more than, "I changed spelling
and grammar in my essay." I am more interested in the changes you made in content than the
changes you made in mechanics.
Example Revision Log
Entry 1 – 8/27 (required entry)
REFLECT IN THIS PART. My peer group read my essay today. They liked that I
gave lots of details about my mom, but they said that I needed to have a better controlling idea.
They said that it's not enough to just have scattered facts. All of my details and sentences need
to all be related somehow. I need to go through and think about what exactly I want to tell my
audience about my mom. What about her is so special?
PLAN FOR THE FUTURE IN THIS PART. When I revise, I think I'm going to talk
about things my mom has taught me. The fact that she teaches me things is a special part of our
relationship that I want to share with my readers. I can use some of the details from my rough
draft, like the part about the piano, but I'll have to get rid of things like the sentence about how
long she's been married because that doesn't fit. I think I should even talk about how she taught
me about learning. That would be a good way to tie the paragraph together at the end.
Entry 2 - 8/29 (required entry)
I did my revisions. I have a better topic sentence now, and the controlling idea of "what
my mom taught me" is clear. All of my sentences talk about things that I learned from her. I
even added more detail about what benefits each thing she taught me had. For instance, I said
what playing Chinese checkers did for me. I think that this helps all of the sentences I wrote to
be connected to my main idea.