Rules for writers, Tenth edition - Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers 2021

Learn from peer review: Revise with comments
Revising, editing, and reflecting
A process for writing

Peer review gives you an opportunity to learn what’s working and not working in your draft. Your peers will offer their suggestions, answer your questions, and help you strengthen your essay.

The following guidelines will help you learn from reviewers’ comments and revise successfully.

✵ Be active. Guide reviewers to understand your purpose and goals for writing, including why you chose your topic and what you hope to accomplish in your draft. Tell reviewers your specific concerns so they can focus their feedback. Ask reviewers to show you what puzzles them about your draft and what is unclear. Always ask questions to make sure you understand your reviewers’ comments.

✵ Have an open mind. After you’ve worked hard on a draft, you might be surprised to hear reviewers tell you it needs more development. Don’t take criticism personally. Your readers are responding to your essay, not to you. Responding to readers’ objections instead of dismissing them will strengthen your ideas and make your essay more persuasive.

✵ Weigh feedback carefully. Your reviewers will offer more suggestions than you can use, so be strategic. Sort through all the comments you receive with your original goals in mind, and focus on global concerns first — otherwise, you’ll be facing the impossible task of trying to incorporate everyone’s advice.

✵ Keep a revision and editing log. To help you become a stronger writer, make a list of the global and sentence-level concerns that keep coming up in your reviewers’ comments. For more on improving your writing with editing logs, see pages 44—45.

REVISE WITH COMMENTS: WHAT DOES “BE SPECIFIC” MEAN?

Often the comments you’ll receive are written as shorthand commands, such as “Be specific!” Such comments don’t show you how to revise, but they do identify where you want to focus your attention. When reviewers say that you need to “be specific,” the comment often signals that you could strengthen your writing by including additional evidence or by analyzing the evidence.

Strategies for Revising

✵ Reread your topic sentence to understand the focus of the paragraph. (See 2a.)

✵ Ask questions. Does the paragraph contain claims that need support? Have you provided evidence — specific examples, vivid details and illustrations, statistics and facts — to help readers understand your ideas and find them persuasive? (See 7f.)

✵ Analyze your evidence. Remember that details and examples don’t speak for themselves. You will need to show readers how evidence supports your claims. (See 4d.)

Excerpt from an online peer review session