Thinking About Peer Review

You have probably done peer review in some form in the past.  That is, you have probably had to review the work of other students to see if you could help them to improve it.  For many students, peer review as they have done it in the past has seemed to be busy work or a waste of time.  But for others, it has proved to be an important learning experience.  In this class, I will ask you to review one another's work at every stage before I take a close look at it myself.  What's the point?  Is it worth the effort?  Take a moment to think about what you are doing when you do peer review.

One place to start in thinking about peer review is to ask what makes it difficult.  Because most of us would say that it is difficult in some sense.    Probably the thing that makes it most difficult is the idea that in reviewing another student's work you seem to be  judging that student.  It can seem to put you in a superior position, or at least you are afraid that it can seem that way.   You face a kind of dilemma in doing peer review.  If you say "nice" things exclusively, you probably won't be very helpful to the writer.  On the other hand, if you provide negative criticism, you risk irritating or offending the writer.   It's a serious problem, and we shouldn't minimize it.  And it shows itself in the two extremes of peer review. 

On the one hand, the fully supportive, "nice guy" approach: "Good job.  Great essay!"  This is probably the most useless response possible from the point of view of the writer.  It tells her absolutely nothing about how she can improve the essay.  It doesn't give her any idea of the essay's strengths and weaknesses.  It probably doesn't even make her feel very good, because the praise is so vague as to not be very credible.

On the other hand, the harshly negative approach:  "I disagree with everything you say."  Vague, unqualified criticism isn't much more useful than vague, unqualified praise.  But it does make the writer feel worse, which is why most of us are less likely to use it.  Neither of these approaches does anyone much good.

The problem with both general praise and general criticism is that they are so general.  They don't point clearly to anything the writer can do, except perhaps start over.  If this is the kind of peer review you have received in the past, you are probably right in thinking it was a waste of time.  Both approaches are "mindless," in just the way we have used the term in the past.

But it doesn't have to be that way.  Peer review can be a way to open up new possibilities for the writer and the reviewer both.  It can be an exercise in mindfulness rather than mindlessness.  Recall the three characteristics of mindfulness as we have defined it before:  the continuous creation of new categories, openness to new information, and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective.   If both writer and reviewer approach the task of peer review mindfully, both can grow from it and do better work because of it.

Even if you have done a good job writing your essay, you are likely to get stuck.  Not stuck in the sense that you can't write, but stuck in the sense that you can't break out of the pattern of what you have already written.  For example, once you have written your thesis statement down, that written sentence will become the shape of your thinking about your thesis.  You will have difficulty stepping away from it, because it will tend to become a powerful model.  That is why it is sometimes so hard to rewrite a thesis that uses a linking verb to put it in the active voice.  You need to change both the subject and verb of your basic sentence to put it in the active voice, but as long as you are looking at the original sentence, you can think about it only with the original subject.  Likewise with your first draft of the essay.  Once you have set down some paragraphs in a certain order, they become the shape of your essay for you, and it is hard to see how they might be different.  That is why most students tend to "revise" only in small ways: changing a word here, deleting one there.  

But the way we learn to become better writers is exactly by revising, by changing what we have already written.  Even if you write fluently and clearly already, you can become a more effective writer by learning to revise better.   Genuine, deep revision is always a learning process, because as I revise what I have written this time I learn how to write better next time.  And genuine, deep revision is mindful reflection on what we have written.  When I revise I come to see what I have already written in terms of new categories; I become open to new information that I had not discovered before; I see what I have written from a different perspective than I assumed when I first wrote it.  Mindfulness leads to revision--and revision, real revision, is mindful.

Because it is so hard to break out of the perspective from which you originally wrote, the easiest and fastest way to true revision is to get some help.   This is where peer review comes in.  Another reader will, by definition, see what you have written from a different perspective than you do.  If you can come to see your writing through the eyes of another, you are already reflecting mindfully on what you have written.  And the more practice you have at seeing what you have written from outside your own perspective, the better you will get at doing your own revision.   So the key to effective peer review is to show the writer how his writing looks from another perspective.

How can you do that without offending or irritating the writer?   Basically, if you as a reader can maintain a mindful perspective, you can both identify with the writer and see the essay from the outside, so to speak.  If you can look at the essay from more than one perspective, you can see what the writer is trying to do and also see how those who differ would see it.  Here are a few practical suggestions for how you might respond to one another's essays and how you might receive the responses of others:

1.    Report your reactions to the essay as statements about yourself rather than judgements about the essay or the writer.   Couch your responses, wherever possible, in "I" statements rather than "you" statements.  Rather than saying "You're wrong when you say this," say "I can't agree with what you say here."  Don't say "Your sentence is so long you make me forget what your point is."  Instead say, "I found myself getting lost before the end of the sentence."  You must, of course, refer to specific parts of the essay.  Identify them and report your experience of them, rather than making some kind of global judgement of them.  This method will help you to respond to one of the most difficult kinds of writing to deal with in peer review: writing that just doesn't interest you.  Don't project your reaction onto the writer or the writing: "This paragraph is really boring."   Instead, honestly report your response, if possible explaining it: "I didn't find myself getting interested or involved with this paragraph, maybe because I have never experienced what you are writing about and I don't have a very clear idea of what you were describing."

As a writer, receiving a peer review, try to view the reviewer's comments as reports of the reviewer's experience, rather than as a judgement on your writing.   You need to see your writing through another's eyes, so try to use the reviewer's response as a tool to see how your writing would look to someone else rather than as a "grade" on your essay or a judgement on you as a person.  Even if the reviewer is not very clear about some things, try to construct a different perspective from what she says.  It may not be easy for the reviewer to explain how she sees your essay; give her the benefit of the doubt and use your imagination to try to fill out a perspective on your essay.  In other words, both as reviewer and as writer, try to avoid the cognitive distortions of personalization and blame.

2.    Give reasons for your reactions, and be as specific as you can.  To say about a given claim or argument in an essay simply "I disagree" tells the writer something, but not very much.  It becomes useful information for the writer only if you give reasons for your disagreement.   The same is true of virtually any other reaction you might have.  Your reasons may take the form of explanations of what you see as flaws in the essay: "I didn't see any evidence to support this claim, and I'm not sure I believe it."  Or they may take the form of arguments for your own point of view where that conflicts with the one presented in the essay.  Remember that one of the jobs that the writer should be doing is to answer objections to his position.  But if he doesn't know that his readers would make a certain objection, he might well omit the whole issue.  Where there are objections that you think are valid to a writer's position, spell them out.   By doing so you are helping the writer to decide what to emphasize in a future revision.

Often the hardest reaction to give a reason for is no reaction at all.   What if a paragraph or the whole essay just leaves you cold, leaves you wondering "So what"?  Here you may have to exercise your imagination.  What is missing from the text that would have involved you?  Examples?  Background information?  Clear movement from one idea to another?  You have to pay close attention both to the text and to your own reaction to it.  Do you find yourself with the writer to a certain point, and then find that you get confused or frustrated because you can't see the connection with what went before?  Does the reader state a general point, and then go on to another general point without giving you the examples that would make that point clear and vivid for you?  Try to identify the place in the essay where you get less involved (it may, of course, be the first paragraph!), and also try to explain as well as you can the reasons why you have trouble keeping focused on what the writer is saying.

3.    After you have read the essay once, look back at it analytically to see how the parts fit together. The first step to doing this is usually to look at the thesis statement and see whether it really represents exactly what the essay says.  If you can point out major elements of the essay that are not reflected in the writer's thesis statement, that will help the writer to see where she has moved away from her plan.  Another useful technique is to look at each paragraph individually.  Does it carry its weight as a paragraph?  Is it unified, with a single topic sentence, express or implied?  Does the paragraph answer the question "How do you know?" of its major claim?  Then consider how the paragraphs fit together.  Is there a reason why they are in this particular order?   Does the essay move in one direction, or does it jump around for no apparent reason?  If you changed the order of the paragraphs, would it damage the essay?   If not, then the order of the paragraphs is probably not logical or motivational.  

4.    After you have read the essay once, ask yourself, "What's missing?"  Were you expecting things that you didn't get in the essay?  What?  Tell the writer.  Did you have questions as you were reading that weren't answered?  Tell the writer what those questions were.  The biggest flaw in many essays is not any error or illogic in what the essay contains, but the fact that it doesn't contain all that it should.  Many essays start well but never finish.  Do you feel at the end of the essay that you got what was promised in the beginning?  Did the writer fulfill his contract with you? (See Tactics for Writing--6 for the definition of Contract.)

5.    Don't hesitate to tell the writer about yourself.  Describe what has happened to you, what you have read, what you think causes you to see the essay in a certain way.  Peer review should be a conversation between the reader and the writer.  You are the intended audience for this essay, so the way it works on you is important.  You will help the writer to become mindful, to be open to different perspectives, the more fully and clearly you can describe to the writer what your own perspective is on the writing.

These ideas may help you to make your peer review both more valuable and more interesting.  Don't try to do everything at once.  You don't need to write another essay in response to the essay you are reviewing.  But also keep in mind that the average peer review, especially at the beginning, is too brief rather than too long.   What counts most is not length, of course, but specificity and honesty.  But you can't be either very specific or very honest in one paragraph.  Give the writer the advantage of your full attention and your careful response.  And then if you can nurture a state of mindfulness, an openness to new perspectives and new information, in doing your peer reviews, you can bring that back to your own writing and revision.   You can learn from one another as writers, if you pay attention to one another.


Copyright © 2000 John Tagg


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