Each person in a three-person group takes each of the following roles in turn:

1. Writer--just reads his/her annotation (Don't explain and don't apologize; simply read your annotation aloud. The urge to explain or elaborate is a sign that something is missing from the writing. Make a note on your paper when you feel this).

Why read aloud? This often allows a writer to discover awkwardness, passages that flow smoothly, places where there is missing information. Listen to yourself for hesitations, points where you have the urge to elaborate on your writing, etc.

Make specific notes on listeners' attempted summary and reactions; use later to clarify and revise the proposal. Errors and gaps in the first listener's summary, as well as questions from both listeners, will give you ideas for making your annotation communicate better.

2. Listeners -- observe their conscious processes during the reading, make notes in margins, and give the writer feedback about what it was like to be a listener/reader.

Be prepared to ask lots of questions to get a very clear image of the research. Use questions to check out your assumptions about what occurred in the research. Avoid the "I don't wanna look dumb" syndrome, where you hesitate to ask a question because the answer "must be obvious." You have the writer's permission to ask questions.

Use the questions on the back of this handout as a guide. Note these questions are just gut reactions -- there is no "right" or "wrong" to them. You are not judging the writing, just letting the writer observe your cognitive processes while you read.

You are also not judging yourself -- you don't need to take on the burden of correcting the writing, you don't need to make suggestions, you don't need to worry that your comments are "inappropriate" or "wrong", or "don't make sense." They are just a moment by moment "stream of consciousness" that you let the writer in on. The writer will take your conscious processes as just that, nothing more.

You need not judge the writer -- avoid statements like "You should have...", "You didn't do this correctly", "You need to...", "This would have worked better if you...".

So if all you do is let the writer into your head as you read the paper, good peer review is in a sense easy. On the other hand, most of us are in the bad habit of ignoring our gut reactions as irrelevant. As a student of psychology, it is a good idea to practice noticing your own fleeting conscious thoughts. I have incorporated that into the course in a variety of ways. Peer review is thus a central component of the course, not just something to get through.

Avoid:

1. comments on grammar, style, spelling, etc. Remember, this is not a final draft. And the point of all those rules on style & grammar is communication, so concentrate on whether the proposal communicates.

2. Here are some words and phrases you are not allowed to use: "that was good" "fine" "nice" "lousy" "neat" "great". Concentrate on understanding the research. You are not being asked to make value judgments. Every annotation can be improved, regardless of how bad or good it currently is. Therefore, we focus on how to improve it, not its current status.

Although having students exercise their powers of self-observation is one of the goals of peer review, the process is meant to improve your paper too! The conscious experiences of others can be valuable to you in deciding how to revise your paper. The goal of a writer is to evoke certain experiences in a reader, and knowing what readers are experiencing for this draft can help you target areas for revision and suggest strategies to try.

Not every experience readers have will be helpful or germane, nor related in a simple way to a needed revision (example: a reader says "I don't understand" in paragraph 4, but the problem can be corrected by revising paragraph 3, or paragraph 5, or even paragraph 1, perhaps by clarifying a single term!). But readers' overall comments should give you a better idea of

    where you are achieving your communicative intention, where you are not achieving it

    where you have left out information, or said too much

    where the organization is not clear, and where it IS clear

    where you have strayed from the question at hand

    etc.

Don't expect to get "instructions" for revision from your reviewers. You will take their comments as nothing more than honest reactions, and evaluate the implications for revision later, in an environment that is calmer, quieter, more reflective than is possible during classroom peer review.

Questions listeners can ask of writers:

    How is fact A connected to fact B?

    Can you tell me more about this sentence? paragraph?

    What would happen if you elaborated on this point? What would happen if you omitted or reduced the discussion of this point?

    Could this information go someplace else? Or, can you provide a transition that makes it fit better where it is?

    I wanted to reread this sentence, because by the time I got to the end, I'd forgotten the beginning.

    Here I thought you meant X (or I thought you were going to say X next), but later I realized that I was wrong.

    I got confused here.

    I need more information about X so I can see where you're going with that.

    I didn't understand what this term referred to until later.

    Why did you decide to include this information? Could we understand the gist of the article without it? What would happen if you left it out?

    What does this difference between two groups say about the hypothesis? What does it tell me about [your topic]?

    Why did the experimenters do X? Why didn't they do X?

    How does this result (or this procedure) relate to the hypothesis?

    Can you give me an example of the differences they found between groups?

    Can you give me an example of the questions they asked/stimuli they used?

Listener: Your job is not to be critical, but to help the reader improve the annotations. You do this by giving your reactions to the annotation so that the writer can determine whether the annotation is evoking the intended ideas. You want to be WITH the writer, not AGAINST her. Don't drag your feet--HELP PEDAL!

Try this: Instead of playing the role of teacher in giving comments, play the role of student. Pretend the annotation was written by a professional, and published in the professional literature. You have been assigned to read and comprehend it for a class. What questions would you ask the instructor (or the author) about the annotated research? Where do you want more information? Where are you puzzled? Confused?

Writer: Your job is to attend carefully to listener reactions and take extensive notes. Take listener reactions and suggestions not as commandments for revision but as a "window" onto the listeners' interpretation of your annotation. You can decide later what revisions to make in response to listener reactions and suggestions.