Peer Edit & Personal Reflection
Background & Foreground: By now in your research process you have completed a draft of your actual research essay. In today’s class, you are going to swap your draft with a collaborator, providing them with a couple types of feedback. Besides annotating your collaborator’s draft and then talking about it with them, you are also going to write them a letter, using rhetorical terms of course. Then, you are going to compose roughly 500-words where you reflect upon what you learned from your collaborator’s project that you want to apply to your own. This text you should integrate into the final draft of your Reflective Essay due on 12/15 in your portfolio.
Here’s a breakdown of the class:
Part I: Peer Swap
Identify a collaborator. Swap research drafts with them.
Read your collaborator’s draft. In their draft, identify the argument and at least 5 claims they make (true or false statements from sources) that support their argument.
Evaluate your collaborator’s body paragraphs for ICE (Introductions, Citations and Explanations/Analysis).
Do the best you can to identify awkward phrases, comma splices, run-ons, fragments. Also, look for ideas that need to be developed further as well as tangents that don’t contribute to the overall argument.
Evaluate the tone and voice of the essay. Is it consistent throughout? What could your collaborator do to enliven the essay for the reader? Or to better unify its style?
Part II: Peer Chat
Take turns discussing the above with your collaborator. Ask each other questions! Be honest, but also be respectful!
Part III: Peer Letter
Write your peer a letter where your detail the strengths of their essay as well as its challenges based on your annotations of their work from Part I. Give this letter to your collaborator when you are done.
Part IV: Your Reflection
Read over the peer critique from your collaborator. How is their letter to you different or similar to the one you just wrote them? What’s the most valuable piece of advice they gave you? What do you think is the most valuable piece of advice you gave them? How is the discussion you had earlier in class going to help you finish your research project? If it the discussion wasn’t helpful, what do you think it was missing?