Peer Feedback: Wolf in White Van

When you provide feedback to your peer about the Wolf in White Van essay, you are not trying to be an “expert” telling them how to “fix” their essay and you are not acting as a teacher grading their essay. Instead, your role is to give the author a sense of how you, as one reader of that essay, react to their argument. There are specific questions below for you to address, but remember that at base what you are trying to do is to help them to make their essay better when they revise it because they have a better sense of someone who is not inside their own head and hearing their thoughts understands the essay when it is in front of them.

Read the essay by the student you’ve been assigned. Then create a document in the Peer Feedback Docs folder on Google drive. Title the document with the name of the student whose essay you are responding to and the title of that student’s essay (in other words, Mady will name her document Kino “[Kino’s Title Here]”).

Paste the list of questions below into the document and then provide a response to each.

  • What do you like best about the essay? (Be honest, but start by saying something positive about the essay.)
  • Reverse Outline: Make an outline of the essay’s major topics. Include the topic(s) of each paragraph.
  • What do you see as the essay’s controlling idea?
  • Does this interpretation agree with the author’s stated controlling idea? In what ways might the paper need to change so that its structure more effectively supports the thesis?
  • Is there sufficient evidence to support all the claims, and if not where is more evidence needed? Are there specific quotes provided as evidence? Are quotes sandwiched — introduced first with a signal phrase, reporting verb, or both; then the quote; and then further explanation — or otherwise integrated into the author’s text well?
  • Where do more connections or explicit contrasts need to be made between points?
  • Does the essay respond carefully to the assignment?
  • Is there something not mentioned in the questions above that you would suggest the author think about as he or she revises the essay?

One comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *