Nearly every writing class relies upon some form of Peer Review. Peer Review is the process of handing your own draft of an assignment to a classmate to read and review, while your classmate hands over his or her own paper for you to read and review. Sometimes, there will be specific guidelines you’ll need to follow as you read the other work; at other times, you’ll be asked to provide feedback in a more freeform response.

So why do we go through this process? Why not simply turn in a first draft to an instructor — the person who gives that final grade — for feedback? Isn’t it the instructor’s ideas that “count”?

Think back to the way that we analyze any assignment. Even peer review can be analyzed. So — what is the purpose? Why would a teacher ask you to review a classmate’s work? What do you stand to learn in this process?

When we have a chance to review someone else’s work in progress, we can learn things that will benefit our own work.

• First of all, reviewing someone else’s paper is a chance to see how others have interpreted the same assignment. This is one way to make sure you’re on the right track in your own writing.
• Second, as you read through someone else’s paper, you may notice things you like — or things you want to avoid. You can use these observations to improve your own writing.
• Third, reviewing others’ work is usually easier than reacting critically to our own. After we’ve poured effort and time into a paper, it can be difficult to make changes. However, when we approach someone else’s paper, we have none of that baggage; we only want to fix what will make the paper read more easily.

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  Fourth, reviewing others’ works can help sharpen up our editing skills. Finding a spelling mistake on our own papers is tricky because if a writer doesn’t know how to write “espresso” the right way, she’ll never catch it on her own paper. However, her coffee-drinking peer reviewer will circle it every time she sees “expresso” written down.

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