Executive summary peer review

For this assignment, you are going to “peer review” two of the essays submitted by your classmates for Assignment 2. Each member of class is being sent 2 essays to review. Each individual’s essay will be reviewed by 2 members of the class.

I will email each person two PDFs for them to review. The goal is here is to review both the content and the presentation in the essay.

This assignment has two parts.

Part 1: Markup the essay

To complete this assignment, you will first mark up these essays as you think appropriate to improve them. You can do this by printing it out, or doing it on a tablet device, or using your PDF reader’s annotation tools. Your job is to give the author feedback about what is good in their essay, and what can be improved in their essay. These can and should involve both suggestions on the writing as well as suggestions on the work itself, to the extent that you’re able to give them.

Part 2: Review form

For each essay that you mark up and hand in, type up a separate “review form”. This can simply be a list of bullet points, about 0.5–1 page long. For each essay that you mark up, append your review form to the PDF. Do not include your name in the review form.

Your marked-up copy and the review form will be given back to the essay’s author anonymously.

Guidelines

As you do your reviews, keep in mind the advice I gave on reviewing papers. Do what you reasonably can to suggest improvements in the essay. Keep in mind that future author revisions would have to conform to the requirements of the original assignment (they only have room to add so much material). Try to indicate what is good and what is bad. Every review should point out both good and bad points. Treat the authors the way you would want them to treat you: Be professional, and be polite!

Also keep in mind that I will grading your reviews. I will expect your reviews to satisfactorily indicate recognition of problems (or praiseworthy aspects) that exist in the essays.

To help with this, consider the following in your reviews:

• Content: Does the paper do a good job of keeping to the spirit of the assignment with respect to content? Do you get a good sense of what the person’s proposed research project is? And how it builds upon existing work?
• Style: Is the paper good in terms of clarity and how enjoyable it was to read?
• Formatting: Does the paper meet the requirements of the assignment in terms of length and formatting requirements? Does its appearance and formatting make it easier or harder to read?

Deliverable

Submit two PDFs. Each PDF should include the marked-up essay and your overall review.