One student’s peer review process - Revising, editing, and reflecting - A process for writing

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

One student’s peer review process
Revising, editing, and reflecting
A process for writing

Student writer Michelle Nguyen’s assignment, a literacy narrative, asked her to explore this question: How have your experiences with writing shaped you as a writer?

Here is Nguyen’s draft, along with the questions she gave her peer reviewers before they read her draft.

QUESTIONS FROM NGUYEN TO PEER REVIEWERS

Alex, Brian, and Sameera: Thanks for reading my draft. Here are three questions I have about my draft: Is my focus clear? Is there anything that confuses you? What specifically should I cut or add to strengthen my draft?

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Rough draft with peer comments

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After rereading her draft and considering the feedback from her classmates, Nguyen realized that she had chosen a good direction but hadn’t focused her draft to meet the expectations of the assignment. Her classmates offered valuable suggestions about adding a photograph of her Hanoi neighborhood and clarifying her main idea. With her classmates’ specific questions and suggestions in mind, and their encouragement to see the undeveloped possibilities in her draft, Nguyen developed some goals for revising.

MICHELLE NGUYEN’S REVISION GOALS

✵ Add a title.

✵ Revise the introduction to set the scene more dramatically. Use Sameera’s idea to include a photo of my neighborhood.

✵ Make the story my story, not the man’s story. Answer Sameera’s question: What did the man see in me and I in him? Delete extra material about the man.

✵ Answer Brian’s question: What is my main idea?

✵ Follow Brian’s suggestion about the connection between wordlessness and worldliness. Maybe I’m trying to say that the surprise was finding writing in silence, not in the noise in my neighborhood.

See 3h for Nguyen’s revised draft.