Consult Instructors, Classmates, Friends, and Family

The most important resources for peer review and collaboration are your instructor, your classmates, and your friends and family. Not only can family and friends provide honest feedback on the quality of your drafts, but they can also be resources for generating ideas about and planning a writing project. Simply discussing a writing project with sympathetic friends or family members can help you make progress on the project. They might remind you of something you’d forgotten about the topic; they might share new information with you; or they might respond in a way that sparks a new idea.

Similarly, classmates and instructors can help you fine-tune a draft by serving as a sounding board for your ideas and by responding to it. Instructors can also show you how to work with peer-review forms and can provide feedback on the quality of the comments you offer to your classmates. Finally, and perhaps most important, instructors can help you understand your assignment — but only if you ask them for advice.