MINILECTURE

Minilecture - Dissertation Criteria & Rating Scale



Minilecture - Dissertation Criteria & Rating Scale

Learning to write a good peer review or peer critique can be a valuable career skill. I once worked for the manager of a large group of analysts in a government agency. He would come in on weekends to review the reports written by the members of the group. The writing in the group got worse and worse as time went by. The problem was that the manager did not know how to write a constructive review. He did not know how to help a writer move a draft along to turn it into a satisfactory final piece of writing (Swales & Feak, 2008).

The problem was that he unnecessarily "word smithed" the document making minor and often unnecessary changes, while at the same making many negative comments about the content. He somehow managed to take ownership of the writing to the extent that the analysts sent him rougher and rougher drafts because they felt that they could do nothing right. From working in this situation, I have a developed a few guidelines for writing a peer review or giving feedback on writing in general.

The first guideline is to focus on the larger issues of the writing first. The best way to do this is to read the paper through one time to determine the main point of the paper and whether that main point is developed consistently throughout the paper. You should mark any sections that are not clear or seem to be out of place. In your peer review, the best thing you can do is to reflect back to the writer what you get out of the paper as the main point and whether the main point is developed clearly and consistently.

The second guideline ...