First, print out a hard copy of this page. In the "Student Web Sites" link of our class web site, find the research proposal of another student in class. If your name appears in the second half of our class list alphabetically, find a proposal draft written by someone in the second half of list; if your name appears in the first half of our class list, find one written by someone in the first half. (This will prevent too many messages from going to just one or two people.) Post your written answers to the steps below as a link on your Assignment Index under section II A (linked to the words "On a proposal draft"), AND send it to the person as the text of an e-mail message. Do not write your answers on this sheet of paper.

Remember that you will be graded on the peer critiques that you write this semester, and the grade will be based on the sincerity of your efforts to really help the writer whose work you are assessing. Your goal here is, of course, to help a classmate learn to write better and achieve a better grade.  In addition, going through these steps should also cause you to reflect on how to improve your own proposal. Do as much of this peer review assignment as you can in class today. The deadline for 1) posting your review as a link to your ai.html and 2) for sending the e-message to a classmate is tonight at 7 p.m. The deadline for posting the final draft of your own proposal (a revision of the first posted draft) is Tuesday at 10 p.m.
 

Step One: Summarize the Assignment

Begin by going back to the original assignment—it’s on our web site, of course, or you can use your hard copy of it—and write a two or three sentence summary of what you believe to be its main purposes and goals.

Step Two: Summarize Your Peer's Text

Next write a two or three sentence summary of your peer's text.

Step Three: Compare the Assignment to Your Peer's Text

Once you have completed Steps One and Two, write a one-paragraph (about four or five sentence) summary of how well your peer's text meets the main purposes and goals of the assignment.  If anything seems short or lacking, point this out; if anything seems especially, particularly well done, point that out too.

Step Four: Review Grammar

Isolate and review each sentence of your peer's text to see if it is grammatically accurate, direct, succinct, and otherwise well written (as you may have heard, it is best to do this by going backwards through the text, sentence by sentence, so that the meaning of the paragraphs doesn’t cause you to glide over less-than-perfect sentences). Write down some sentences that you feel do not meet these criteria; rewrite each sentence as a potentially new and improved version. Have at least two of these pairs, and for each original/revised sentence pair, provide an explanation for the revision. (Finally, remember that you should practice in your own writing what you preach! Use the advice that you just gave when you work on your own writing.)