Undergraduate students can help faculty members teach writing by helping each other.
Many will believe I’m deluded when I assert that.
To many faculty members, peer response (also known as peer review, peer
editing, or collaborative learning) is—as I’ve often heard
claimed—simply a case of “the blind leading the blind.” It’s my
experience, though, that Texas A&M students can offer highly useful
advice to one another about writing. Here’s why I advocate peer
responses:
Peer responses slow writers down, giving them time to re-see (revise).
In writing, time often translates into improvement. Time spent with
other students in conversation over a text—especially when guided by a
rubric or a set of leading questions—usually will produce better
writing. Peers reading a text aloud together, puzzling over its meaning
and form, will find more of its gaps and errors than will a lone writer
reading silently, filling in those lapses through familiarity with what
he meant.
Peer responses allow students to form judgments about what makes
effective writing. To do a productive peer response, students must
internalize some of the criteria for effective writing. Then they must
judge their peers’ work against those criteria. Assessing a text in
this manner is a necessary skill for good writing. Eventually, students
will judge their own efforts against the standards they’ve learned.
Peer responses encourage students to learn from one another. Students
working together to improve a paper bring to the task their various
talents. The student with strong writing skills shares those abilities,
usually in a more comprehensible form than an instructor would.
Moreover, because writing is a complex task, students get to share
their own expertise: One student might be strong in organization,
another in argument, and a third in the rules of grammar. Together,
they develop a better paper while teaching each other.
Peer responses provide a fresh way for students to learn course
content. While students are reviewing each other’s texts, they’re also
reinforcing their knowledge of course material. For instance, a peer
responder considers whether her classmate has fully understood a theory
being presented. Another student analyzes a peer’s lab report to see if
conclusions drawn from an experiment are correct. Students can’t
address the writing without also considering the subject matter.
Peer responses promote engaged and active learning. Instructor comments
written on a completed paper typically have little impact; it’s too
late then for students to apply the knowledge. An instructor may
describe a passage as wordy or awkward, but unless a student is allowed
to revise, she won’t learn how to make that passage concise or
graceful. When she gets that sort of reaction from a peer on an early
draft, though, it encourages re-engagement with the text.
While instructors seldom have time to comment on all drafts of all
papers, we do have time for peer responses, either in class or as
homework. Ideally, students will get some response from peers and some
from instructors, all of it in time to be used in revision.
I hope you will experiment with peer responses. I believe the process can help your students improve their writing.
The UWC Web site provides information about peer responses. The UWC
offers a peer response workshop in our newly expanded classroom
workshop program.
— Dr. Valerie M. Balester
Executive Director
University Writing Center
v-balester@tamu.edu
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Tidbits
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You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
— Larry McMurtry
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Fall 2005 