Whenever you respond to a piece of writing, think of the response you are giving as a letter to the writer of the draft. Your written response should usually have two parts: visual markings or other annotations on the text, and a personal letter to the writer.

Before you read the draft, ask the writer for any feedback instructions, and make sure you know whether this is an early-stage, intermediate-stage, or late-stage draft.

Take the writer’s requests seriously. If, for example, the writer asks you to look at specific aspects of his or her writing and to ignore others, be sure to respond to that request. To begin your review, read straight through the project and think about the writer’s specific instructions as well as the following general guidelines.

A summary of the draft

After reading the draft, begin by summarizing the main idea(s) of the piece of writing. You might begin by writing I think the main argument is . . . or In this draft, you promise to. . . . Then outline the main points that support the thesis.

Once you prepare the outline, your most important work as a peer reviewer can begin. You need to think alongside the writer about how to support the thesis and arrange details most effectively for the audience. Ask yourself the following questions, and make notes that you can include in the letter to the writer:

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Your markup of the draft

Next, as you reread the draft, mark up the draft to give the writer specific feedback. Your comments, annotations, and other markings should respond to what is already written. Aim for a balance between compliments and constructive criticism. If you think the author has stated something well, comment on why you like it. If you have trouble understanding or following the writer’s ideas, comment on what you think may be causing problems.

One of your main goals as a peer reviewer is to help the writer see his or her draft differently. You want to show the writer what does and doesn’t work about particular aspects of the draft. Visually marking a draft can help the writer know at a glance what revisions the reviewer suggests. As long as you explain what your annotations mean, you can use underlining, highlighting, or other visual annotations to point out patterns to the writer. Visual annotations can make a powerful statement about what needs to be revised.

As you mark up the draft, always think about how you would respond to the same markups in your own draft. Avoid an overwhelming number of comments or changes, for example, and don’t highlight too extensively. Your job in marking up the text is to point out the problems, not to solve them (though you should certainly offer suggestions).

Markup for a print draft

If you are reviewing a hard copy of a draft, write compliments in the left margin and critiques, questions, and suggestions in the right margin.

Markup for a digital document

Save your annotations of the file in a folder under a name you will recognize. (For example, Ann G. Smith might name the file for the first draft of Javier Jabari’s first essay jabari essay1 d1 ags.doc.) You can use footnotes or the “track changes” function of your word-processing program to add comments and suggestions and to revise the text of written-word documents. Insert a comment explaining each revision and suggesting how the writer can build on it in the next draft.

Markup for a media draft

For media drafts that are difficult to annotate visually, ask the writer about preferred ways to offer suggestions: audio annotations? written notes? comments on a posted file? face-to-face discussion? something else?

Ways to frame effective marginal comments

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A letter to the writer

Begin by addressing the writer by name (Dear Javier). Using your outline, identify the main points of the draft, and write your suggestions in the letter. You might use sentences like I didn’t understand ________. Could you explain it differently? I think ________ is your strongest point, and I recommend you move ________. This portion of the letter will help the writer make the most significant changes to the argument and supporting evidence.

After you have added all your markups to the draft, conclude your letter by adding two or three brief paragraphs addressing the following points:

Read over your comments once more, checking your tone and clarity. Close by signing your name. Save your response, and send it to the writer using the method recommended by your instructor.

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Sample: Excerpts from a peer review of a student’s draft

Below are the first paragraphs of an early draft by first-year writing student Emily Lesk, as reviewed by two other students, Beatrice Kim and Nastassia Lopez.

Markup of the draft

Beatrice and Nastassia reviewed the draft separately and combined their comments on the draft they returned to Emily. As this review shows, Nastassia and Bea agreed on some of the major problems—and good points—in Emily’s draft. Their comments on the draft, however, revealed some different responses.

Letter to the writer

Emily's two peer-review partners also sent her this email with additional overall comments.

Hi Emily:

We’re attaching your draft with our comments. Good luck on revising!

First, we think this is a great draft. You got us interested right away with the story about your T-shirt and we just wanted to keep on reading. So the introduction seems really good. But the introduction goes on for a while—several paragraphs, we think, and we were beginning to wonder what your point was and when you were going to get to it. And when you get to your thesis, could you make it a little more specific or say a little more about what it means that Coca-Cola is an icon that shapes identity? This last idea wasn’t clear to us.

Your stance, though, is very clear, and we liked that you talked about how you were pulled into the whole Coke thing even though you don’t particularly like the soda. Sometimes we got bogged down in a ton of details, though, and felt like maybe you were telling us too much.

We were impressed with some of the words you use—we had to look up what “potable” meant! But sometimes we weren’t sure a word was the very best one—we marked some of these words on your draft for you.

See you in class.

Nastassia and Bea

P.S. Could you add a picture of your T-shirt? It would be cool to see what it looks like.

Emily also got advice from her instructor, who suggested that Emily do a careful outline of this draft to check for how one point led to another and to see if the draft stayed on track.

On the basis of her own review of her work as well as all of the responses she received, Emily decided to (1) make her thesis more explicit, (2) delete some extraneous information and examples, (3) integrate a photo of the T-shirt into her text, and (4) work especially hard on the tone and length of her introduction and on word choice.

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Storyboard on being a peer reviewer

Video Prompt: Lessons from being a peer reviewer

Student writing: Early draft (Emily Lesk)