How peer editing works
Peer Discussion and Evaluation
Peer response has two purposes: The first is to help writers learn to write for a diverse audience; the second is for audiences to let writers know how well they are communicating their ideas. For peer response to successful, both the audience and the writer must understand their responsibilities.
Writers
Keep an open mind; comments are made to help you improve your writing. The comments are about your communication, not about you personally. They are not meant to offend in any way. Also, ask specific questions about comments that you do not understand. Lastly, you must choose which comments to consider and which to discard. Not all comments will correspond with your purpose for writing, and ultimately, you are in control of your writing task.
Responders

Your primary responsibility is to help and encourage the writer. You should reply honestly to strengths and weaknesses in the paper while keeping in mind that you are not reading a finished product., nor are you responsible for the entire revision process. Make sure your responses are specific. In other words, do not say "this is good" or "this is bad." Tell why it is effective or not effective in communicating the purpose of the writing. Areas that you can look at include:
o Clear thesis or topic sentence
o Solid support of thesis statements
o Relevant details
o Accurate spelling or word choice
o Appropriate word choice (No "cool" "pretty good" "ain't" "real nice" "butt" or profanity, etc.)
o Complete sentences (no fragments)
o Complexc and complete paragraphs
o Interesting subject
o Consistent tense
o Subject Verb agreement
o No repetitive word choice
o Specific details (red, blue, nine, South Dakota, German Shepherd, Aunt Lisa, 1964, etc.)

Both responders and writers should keep a positive attitude, ask questions (none are ever "stupid"), and follow the instructor’s specific peer editing instructions for each assignment.
For this class peer responses will be handled as follows.
After all student writing assignments for each week have been submitted, you will respond to student's paper, following the above guidelines. It will probably work best if you print each of these off so that you can refer to them as you type. I might ask you to look at different things with different papers, but I will inform you of these as we go along.

Following specific instructions provided by the instructor (these will change as the semester progresses and you learn more), students will submit their responses in the Discussion Board area for the writer’s perusal. You do this by hitting the “reply” button after the posting.
Any questions about the writing and the responses will be discussed during chat sessions, in the Discussion Board, or students can e-mail their questions to each other.

Peer responses are required. Points are given for adequate responses. Half-hearted or incomplete evaluations will not be awarded points. Be considerate of your writing audience by spellchecking and grammarchecking your work before you post it for peer reading. This may mean you write it first in your document section and then copy and paste it into the Discussion Board.