APPENDICES: Academic Writing Basics
Appendix H: Peer Review Essentials
Suzan Last and Loren Gaudet
Peer review is standard in both professional and academic contexts. When you submit a paper in a course, or deliver a document to a client, you’re not usually sitting in front of the person who reads your work while they read it. Even though your writing may make sense to you, there’s no guarantee that your reader will engage with your writing in the way that you intended. In fact, different readers will have different lived experiences, different knowledges, and different backgrounds, and all of these can affect a reading experience. This is one of the reasons that it’s so important to keep your audience(s) in mind while you’re writing. If you are creating content, whether written or in some other mode, having a colleague review it before presenting it to the final intended audience is common practice.
Peer review entails having a peer — a fellow student who is familiar with your assignment, or a colleague who understands your purpose — review and offer feedback on the effectiveness of your content and how it might be improved. While peer review ultimately benefits the intended reader/user as a form of “quality control” ensuring an effective final product, it also has clear benefits for both the content creator and the reviewer. In the process of peer review, creators can get helpful feedback on how they can improve their content/organization/format, and reviewers can learn from the content they are reviewing, reinforce the assignment and grading criteria, and come back to their own draft with a fresh perspective. For both it is a helpful way to review content, structure, style and formatting before submitting your final document to its intended reader. Building in time for peer review also helps with time management, as you have a completed final draft well before the due date.
In order to attain the maximum benefits of Peer Review, both authors and reviewers should keep the following strategies in mind:
Author Strategies
- Be prepared: submit the most polished and complete draft possible in order to fully benefit from peer review. A partial or very rough draft can benefit from some preliminary review, but a completed draft can elicit more helpful and detailed feedback.
- Give reviewer some guidance: describe the concerns you have about your paper at this point. Alert your reviewer to areas where you would particularly appreciate feedback. If the reviewer is not familiar with your purpose and audience, fill them in.
- Be open to new ideas: avoid becoming defensive about the feedback; remember, your reviewer is trying help you improve your draft. Consider alternative viewpoints you may not have thought of before; listen before deciding what you will do.
- Consider advice carefully: think critically about whether the reviewer’s suggestions will help you to improve your draft and if they are appropriate for your purpose and audience. What and how you