DOCUMENT ANALYSIS ACTIVITY

Critiquing a Draft Clearly and Diplomatically

This is an excerpt from the methods section of a report about computer servers. In this section, the writer is explaining the tasks he performed in analyzing different servers. In a later section, he explains what he learned from the analysis. The comments in the balloons were inserted into the document by the author’s colleague.

The questions below ask you to think about techniques for critiquing (as outlined in Critiquing a Colleague's Work).

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Question 3.1

1. What is the tone of the comments? How can they be improved?

Question 3.2

2. How well does the collaborator address the larger issues?

Question 3.3

3. How well does the collaborator address the writing, not the writer?

Question 3.4

4. How well do the collaborator’s comments focus on the goal of the document, rather than judging the quality of the writing?

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