Think about the most helpful feedback you’ve ever received from a teacher, a coa
Think about the most helpful feedback you’ve ever received from a teacher, a coach, a parent, or a friend. What did they tell you? How did they phrase it? Why did you believe what they were saying?
In general, we accept feedback best from people we trust because we believe they have our best interests at heart. In a college class where the faces around you change frequently, it’s hard to develop that level of trust. So in peer review, we have to create credibility — that’s trustworthiness — through a process of Restating, Praising, and Criticizing.
Restating
The first step in providing good peer feedback is to prove to your peer that you’ve actually read and tried to understand her writing. If you’ve ever been through peer review before, you know that receiving feedback where the reader has completely missed your point is discourgaing; it’s also hard when someone else doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to what you’re saying.
To show a writer that we’re on her side, we can restate her main idea (also known as her thesis or topic sentence). This will show that we’ve read the piece and tried our best to understand what the writer wanted to say — not what we wanted to hear, but what she was trying to say.
To provide a good restatement of the piece, follow these steps:
- Read the piece at least twice.
- On your first read, don’t pause to highlight or make notes or mark mistakes — just read to see what’s going on.
- On the second read, start to mark places where you have questions, places that you particularly like, or places where you’re sure some fix is needed.
- After you’ve read the piece, get a separate piece of paper and, without looking, write down a sentence or two that sums up what you think is the author’s main point.
- Try to complete this sentence: I thought your major point was _______________.
- Sometimes, in an early draft, it can be hard to nail down a precise main point. In this case, try to put yourself in the writer’s shoes, and think, “What do I think they most want to say in this whole thing?” Then fill in this sentence: The point I think you want to make here is ___________, though you also spend time saying _____________ and/or _______________.
You may need to complete this process more than once just to feel secure that you understand what the piece is saying. That’s great! That means you really are working with the paper, and your peer will appreciate your efforts.
If you provide peer feedback in person, this is also a valuable place to start. Think how much nicer it would be to have someone say, “What I thought you were writing about was _________” rather than just having him jump in with criticism.
Giving Positive Feedback (Praise, or What’s Working)
We tend to focus on what’s going wrong in a paper because, as writers and students, we want to know what to fix as we go through the revision process. However, most good feedback will include a section on what’s actually working in a paper, too. Positive feedback encourages