Improving Peer Review ENGL 1102 Ingram S14Based on what you told me in Thursdays warm-ups, here are my suggestions:

1. You cant improve your writing unless you talk about it, work with it, play with it, explore with it. Part of this working and playing and exploring is REVISION. Revision means re-seeing, re-writing, adding, subtracting, re-wording, and re-organizing. It means looking at content, organization, and purpose and figuring out if your draft is as effective as possible. Part of that effectiveness is editing, but revision comes firstbecause editing can be saved for later when you are sure youve said everything you want to say in the way you want to say it.2. We need to shift our understanding of the GOALS of peer review. The goals are not to FIX, CHANGE, FIND WHATS WRONG WITH, or EDIT another writers draft.

The goals are to READ, DISCUSS, BRAINSTORM, BOUNCE IDEAS OFF EACH OTHER, HAVE A DIALOGUE,OFFER SUGGESTIONS, and LEAVE WITH IDEAS.

This writing class is couched in participationist theory, which says that we make knowledge by participating in its making through reading, writing, and talking to others. So, my suggestion is to TALK with each other as much as you can during small group workshops. The *focus questions* I give you can generate lots of discussion.

3. After you engage in peer review and you get home to work on your draft on your own, it is up to you and only you to revise your paper based on what youve learned in peer review. Remember, its not your group members responsibility to FIX, CHANGE, FIND WHATS WRONG WITH or EDIT your paper for you. Thats your responsibility to figure all that out after your peer readers tell you about their experience with your draft. Your question to yourself should be, Based on everything my group-mates said, what changes can I make in order to make this draft better?

4. Writing exists in social contextsmeaning that its written, with a purpose, for particular readers. As a writer, then, you have to pay attention to how your writing is being received by those readers. Remember, though, that every piece of feedback given to you is up for debate. Every single comment. Its up to you, the writer, to distinguish helpful comments from unhelpful ones and to make good decisions about your drafts with the ultimate goal in mind of making your draft better: more powerful, more purposeful, more easily received by your readers. And, bringing us full circle to the top of the page: you cant do any of that without working, playing and exploring through revision. The more revision you do, the more youll learn, the more youll have to write about in your final e-Portfolio.Talking About Writing Word/Phrase Bank:

Parts of the writing:Describing the writing:Whos involved:sentenceuseful writer/author/creator/designerparagraphthoughtful floweryreader/audiencepassageinformative clean poeticquotepowerful effectiveWhat writers do:block quoterelatable interestingsynthesize, combinetopic sentencedetailed powerfulnarrateconcluding sentencetone mood colloquial summarizeintroductionunclear muddy wordyre-order, restructure, re-conclusionbland lackingorganize, move stuffbodyfluid/fluidityexpandtitlepurpose/purposefulcondenseheadingHow the writing works:edit, polishsubheadingethos appeal to ethos ethical appealexplaindetails/specificspathos appeal to pathos pathetic appealaddsensory detailslogos appeal to logos logical appealsubtract/omitthesiskairossyntaxlinguistic mode - linguisticallydictionspatial mode - spatiallyaural mode - aurallyvisual mode - visuallygestural mode

Starter Phrases:I liked this becauseI was confused here becauseThis passage made me feel.This part made me think aboutI question you here becauseI wonder ifI understand why you did this, but what if you triedYou do this really well here, so what if you did more of it here?What were you trying to say here? What was your thinking behind?What is the purpose of?What does this mean?