Time required for the exercise: entire class period

Before the class meeting:

• Every writer should have a working draft of their essay—it doesn’t have to be completely drafted, but it should be more than half of a full draft—and should print 2 copies of their drafts. These copies must not have the writer’s name on it anywhere (i.e., the copies are anonymized). The essay draft must be titled, so that the anonymized copy of the essay can nevertheless be identified by its title.
• Every writer should share their essay title with the instructor in advance, so that the instructor knows which essay belongs to which writer, going by the titles. The instructor will keep a list of these, so that only the instructor can match the essays to their respective writers.
• The writer should fill out 2 copies of the following checklist (handout copies will be provided in advance by the instructor; everyone should have taken 2 to fill out) and append it to the front of their essay draft copies. Everything must still be anonymized.

CHECKLIST FOR YOUR PEER REVIEWER
Please check below the items that you would like your reviewer to pay attention to while reading your essay draft, so that they can provide feedback focused on those items.

You should limit yourself to checking only 3 items, so that your reviewer can prioritize them:

Is the argument or main idea of the essay clear? Are there sections of the essay that stray from it?
Does the writer identify the critical stakes of their argument or intellectual project?
Are the claims well supported by the evidence that the writer provides?
Are long quotations adequately analyzed, qualified, or explained?
Are quotations smoothly incorporated within sentences?
Are the cited sources (if any) relevant and appropriately introduced? Have any texts been cited incorrectly or left uncited? Are the sources attributed to the correct author?
Do the sentences read without difficulty? Are there any sentences that are too long? Too short?
Are paragraphs cohesive (i.e., do they connect in a clear relation to one another)?
Is the essay’s title clear and appropriate?
Other: __________________________________________________________

Writers should bring to class the 2 anonymized, titled copies of their drafts with the checklist form attached to both of them.

During the class meeting:

• Before beginning the peer review exercise, the instructor might consider having a discussion with the whole class about the peer review process in academia, and why it is a widely practiced and important part of the production of scholarship.
• Writers should turn in the copies of their essay drafts + checklists to the instructor, who will shuffle them and distribute them among students so that everyone has 2 essays to read and review that are not their own. Now everyone will be in the position of a blind peer reviewer, reading anonymized essay drafts.
• Prior to reading each essay draft, reviewers should carefully look over the checklist form that the writer has filled out, then keep those items in mind as they read. While reading, they should mark/highlight/annotate sentences or phrases that are especially clear or insightful, as well as parts of the essay that give the reviewer confusion or difficulty for some reason.
• After the reviewer has finished reading an essay draft, they should provide brief written feedback at the end of the draft, responding in particular to the checked items in the attached form. Comments should give descriptive feedback about the reviewer’s reading experience (e.g., “I struggled to understand paragraph 3 because…” or “I found x on page y really well-put”), rather than merely prescriptive feedback (e.g., “You should do this-or-that” or “You need to do so-and-so”).* In these comments, make sure to say at least one thing that the writer did successfully, and one thing that was the most challenging for the reviewer to read or understand.

*This exercise presupposes that the instructor has, in a previous class session, defined and discussed the nature of descriptive and prescriptive feedback with the students.

• Once everyone has reviewed and given feedback on two essay drafts, they should return these copies to the instructor. The instructor will sort through the reviewed copies and distribute them back to the original writer. Writers will now have two copies of their drafts with peer feedback for taking into account during the revision process.

After the peer review session, led by the instructor:

• There will be a class discussion on the benefits of anonymized feedback and students’ critical takeaways from undergoing the blind peer review process; strategies for handling a large volume of feedback; how to plan and organize the revision process; and the intellectual and emotional experience of both giving feedback and receiving feedback.