Thursday, July 10, 2008
Peer Editing
I was wondering what you all thought about peer editing. Learning how to edit properly is a crucial skill to have, especially for those students going on to university, but my experiences with peer editing have been pretty bad. Most of the time, students' grammar/style/spelling/etc. skills were so poor that they couldn't offer any constructive criticism. Plus, we were rarely asked to hand in multiple drafts of anything. Any suggestions on teaching peer or self-editing skills?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Yes I mainly had negative experiences too. If I worked with a friend, we always just told each other it was good and then sat and gossiped for the rest of the time, haha. When I wasn't with a friend, we were usually too shy to say anything really helpful, at least I was, because I didn't want to offend them. And when I did offer criticism, they usually just looked mad at me afterward.
If guidelines are set out, like what Leanna said today about asking a question of your partner to further their thinking, that might be ok...but I would love to hear some new ideas about peer editing if anyone has any
Oooh, maybe they could be dispersed anonymously so you don't know whose work you are editing?
I have had negative experiences too with peers evaluating work. Usually the person did not care about quality put into comments and passed off anything if it did not make sense to them. My suggestion for teaching students how to review their peers' work would be to create a criteria sheet outlining the qualities found in a excellent, good or satisfactory writing assignment and giving them an example of an excellent assignment. I would teach the students before hand what constructive criticism is and how to give it in a way that would help the writer analyze their own work because there is always room for improvement. Hopefully students will then realize that peer editing is more than saying "good job!"
One method might be to take part of a paper you wrote for university, or write a short essay full of mistakes, and put it on the overhead. Then you can talk yourself through the editing process, marking up the overhead, to show the class what it looks like.
I have had negative experiences with peer editing too. But, I have also had a positive experience with peer editing. In one of my university English classes, our prof made us do peer edits on the fellow students essays. She handed out a 3 page outline to each of us with questions in order to allow us to peer edit properly. This outline forced the students to pay close attention to grammatical aspects of the paper but also to the style and content. We all had to fill out the 3 page peer edit outline. Then, we had to hand this back to the person whose work we were correcting. And when we handed in our final copy, the peer editors were graded on how well they edited and the person was also graded on if they actually corrected the mistakes that were pointed out by the peer editors.
I thought this was an effective way to do peer editing as it really forced the peer editors and the person to both critically analyze their work.
I never liked peer editing when I was in high school. Like it has been said in some of the other comments people wouldn't say anything or they would talk about something else. I never had enough confidence in my own essay writing to critique someone else's work. I could pick out spelling errors but grammar was different. Along with not being confident enough I wouldn't want to tell somebody they did something wrong.
To avoid this I think you would need to be sure that everyone is at the ability to help somebody else. One would also have to talk about constructive criticism so that people don't take another opinion personally. Let the students know that they are not re-writing the person's work but rather letting them know what some of the mistakes are.
Post a Comment