Blog Post #3

How Can You Provide Meaningful Feedback To Your Peers?

In order for students to be successful writers, they first must learn how to peer review/edit. Peer editing is working with a classmate (or someone your age) to help improve, revise, and edit their work. The video, What is Peer Editing? and the slideshow, Peer Edit with Perfection! tutorial, introduces three steps to be successful in peer editing.

Step 1: Compliment

When editing a peers paper, you should always start off with a compliment. Something like, "I really liked your topic" or "great choice of wording, it really got your point across." You are helping someone enhance their work. Their hard work! No one wants to have complete negativity towards their work.

Step 2: Suggestions

Suggestions are always helpful when peer editing. If you find something that you think isn't right, a suggestion would be helpful on how to correct it. When making suggestions, you should be as positive as you can. You should also be specific when making suggestions on things such as word choice, details, organization, sentences, and the topic.

Step 3: Corrections

Making corrections is possibly the easiest part of correctly peer editing a paper. You are simply checking for correct punctuation, grammar errors, misspelling, and correct use of sentences.

I absolutely loved watching students act out the wrong ways of peer editing in the Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes. They came up with some very creative names for each wrong-doing. A few of my favorites were: "Jean the Generator", "Off-Task Oliver", and "Defensive Dave". All of these can happen to anybody. "Jean the Generator" was not being specific enough. She would give criticism to her peer but wasn't specific enough for her peer to understand fully. "Off-Task Oliver" was not concentrating on peer editing. He got sidetracked often; which is one thing that I know is easy to do. He couldn't keep his attention on listening to his classmate and distracted others around him. And last but not least, "Defensive Dave". He got defensive over the criticism that was given to him. One thing to remember when peer editing, is to keep an open mind when given suggestions. You don't have to use them, they are just suggestions to help improve your work.