Peer-to-Peer Review

There are a lot of reasons that peer review can be helpful, for students and for their instructor both, not least of which is the way that peer review can shift responsibility for stronger, sharper writing from a vertical and hierarchical model to a more horizontal and democratic one. This set of assignments allows students to not only participate in and benefit from peer review exercises, but begin to think critically about the value and process of social revision while increasing their skill set with digital technology. What follows are instructions for peer review for three different papers, which could be written back-to-back or spread across an entire semester. By no means do the papers need to be of any particular genre (research, advocacy, etc.) or any specific length or even have any particular relationship to one another; rather, what matters for the purposes of this plan is that the writing would benefit from peer review, whether that be in terms of grammar or rhetoric or what have you.

1. The first peer review exercise is the most traditional: Students should bring in their finished papers the day the essays are due (or perhaps just before). In self-selected pairs or trios, students should pass the papers around, in the margins attempting to answer whatever specific goals the instructor might set, for brief face-to-face discussion at the end of class. These might include:
• Correcting any/all mechanical errors
• Summarizing the basic argument in 3–4 sentences
• Noting the strongest/weakest passage and articulating why it is so strong/weak
2. In the second exercise, students will utilize the peer review functionality of some virtual classroom software — say, Canvas or Blackboard — to read through and comment on the papers of a couple of their classmates, this time grouped randomly. Such software offer a range of different markup tools, including line-by-line annotations and multicolor highlighters, that suggest a number of inventive possibilities: Perhaps all spelling errors can be highlighted blue and all run-ons red; or, if the students have completed a typical rhetorical analysis, whatever sections deal with pathos might be in green and those with ethos in yellow. The instructor might even encourage students to explore possibilities only afforded by digital technology, such as using reaction gifs at points in the marginalia.
3. For the final exercise, students will upload an abbreviated version of their paper to a class-associated blog; once every essay is online, students will leave their feedback as comments on (at least two) individual posts. To maintain anonymity while still being able to tell who is who, you might want to allow students to use their initials in place of their actual names — or have a little more fun with it and allow students to create their own username. Leaving specific feedback will no doubt be more difficult at this stage, so the comments will likely be general if left to their own impulses, but for the purposes of experimentation students might be encouraged to devise their own way to note particularly jarring typos or specific points of interest.

Once the whole set of exercises have been explored, the class should discuss the benefits and failures of each type of technology, in effect reviewing their own peer reviewing: Which did they find easiest to use? Which was most helpful?