Getting novice writers to respond to one another's writing is an enormous challenge--for a variety of reasons.  First-year students at the university have not had a great deal of experience responding to one another's work.  They are accustomed to teachers making most of the judgments about their writing.  Students are also reluctant to comment on one another's writing because they don't want to criticize their friends and associates; young people are concerned about maintaining smooth social relations.  Finally, students have trouble responding to one another's writing because they haven't developed confidence in their own sense of what good writing is.  Many students are able--even eager--to point out spelling and mechanical errors, but they feel less competent to talk about issues of evidence, development, style, and so forth.  On the other hand, when peer response works well and students begin to feel the power available to them as shapers of language, the class is transformed into a group of real writers.

          Despite students' reluctance—sometimes active resistance--to responding to one another's writing, peer response is a teachable skill and perhaps one of the most important things we can help students learn.  It creates a community of writers who become responsible to one another.  In a writing workshop, students make a commitment to help one another succeed.  Individual students' skills, critical abilities, and areas of expertise come to be useful and valued by the community as students teach and learn from one another.  Peer response also teaches students to become critical thinkers.  They may not come into our classes doing that naturally, but as students make critical judgments and observe others doing the same, they develop skill.  We can also demonstrate to students that responding to one another's work does not mean being mean or "cutting." By modeling response, we can help students see the rich possibilities available to them as writers.

          Of course, it’s not possible to teach every student to become a lover of language through peer groups.  Sometimes in one class, one may come in talking to one another enthusiastically about their drafts while four other groups need to be jump started, and a final group talks more about the potholes in Reno than they do about their writing.  Most students, however, spend a good deal of time reading and talking about one another's work and take some steps in developing critical skills.

          There are many ways to run a writing workshop, and it is good to do some experimenting so that you can see the advantages and disadvantages of various processes for your own situation and teaching style.  Some instructors run whole-class writing workshops; others use small groups of three to five students.  Some instructors keep the same groups throughout the semester; others change small groups periodically or even for every editing session.  Some allow students to choose their own groups; some assign.  Talk with your colleagues about their strategies.  What’s important is to impart the spirit of collaborative, ongoing work with writing that is fostered in a workshop setting.

          The next few pages contain some guidelines for peer groups and some sample edit­ing/response guides.  The problem with using editing guides is that students often march slavishly through them as if they were some workbook exercise.  On the other hand, using an editing guide--at least at the beginning--gives students some ideas about the issues they can address.  Try using one or two at the beginning of the semester; then get away from them as soon as possible.  Some instructors have students develop their own editing guides.  Students should take home from class some notes about their work, either written by themselves or by their respondents.

PEER RESPONSE GUIDELINES

Students can help one another at every stage of the writing process:

·        Getting an idea: Students share lists of writing ideas and talk about the ones that they think would be most interesting and satisfying to write.

·        Prewriting: Students share freewritings and other early writings to discover what most engages the reader, what the reader would like to know about the topic.

·        Drafting and Revising: Students share drafts to see where they have communicated successfully and where they need to develop ideas, add detail, reorganize, delete, clarify.

·        Copyediting:      Students exchange papers and read final drafts for errors in spelling, mechanics, usage.

·        Publishing: Students read on another's papers in final published form in a class book and write letters to authors to show their appreciation.

Reader's Roles:

1.       To be supportive

2.       To share his/her perceptions as accurately as possible about how s/he responded to the paper--confusion, lack of interest, compassion, annoyance, amusement, pleasure, etc.

3.       To be helpful; to give suggestions and advice in terms that will be most useful to the writers. 

Writer’s Roles:

1.       To listen to his/her readers and try to understand their responses.

2.       To make judgments about her/his readers’ responses.  Not all advice is equal; not all suggestions are valid.

 

 

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