Peer Editing Exercise for Paper Three

CRTW 201

Dr. Fike

The purpose of today's exercise is for you to write a series of responses to one or two classmates' assignments.  This should take you all hour.  Note:  You should write, not talk.  Your written answers will take the form of a standards check. Here are the standards of critical thinking:  clarity, accuracy, importance/relevance, sufficiency, depth, breadth, precision.  Your job in much of the following exercise will be to apply these to your classmates' papers.  "Yes" or "no" answers are not appropriate:  write a paragraph for each of the steps below. 

Here is a series of questions to which you should write responses on separate paper to give your authors at the end of the period:

STEP TWO

1.  Accuracy:  Has s/he correctly used the elements to analyze a class?  Why or why not?  Offer corrections, suggestions, and augmentations.

STEP THREE

2.  Sufficiency and relevance:  Do you want to know anything further about the author's interview with his/her professor?  If so, what?  Does the material in this section act as an effective hinge between the class visit and the analysis of the article and of the discipline?  Why or why not?  Offer corrections, suggestions, and augmentations.

STEP FOUR

3.  Clarity:  Does the author apply the elements to a scholarly article in such a way that you, as a nonmajor in that discipline, can understand what the article is about?  Why or why not? 

4.  Clarity:  How might the analysis of the article be improved so that it is more understandable to nonmajors?

STEP FIVE

5.  Depth and breadth:  Does the author's analysis of his/her discipline go into detail while covering enough ground?  Why or why not?  Could either depth or breadth be improved?  In other words, what things have not yet been covered?

Step six is on the back.

STEP SIX

6.  Answer all of the following questions about the classical argument:

• Precision:  What is the paper's focused topic?  (If it is not a passage from the author's scholarly article, put up a red flag.)  Can you suggest a rewording of the thesis to make it more effective?
• Precision:  Does the thesis include the focused topic and conform to the three-part formula (Although..., I will argue that...because...)?  Does the thesis take a stand on whether or not the author is majoring in a discipline whose type of required thinking s/he is or is not well suited for?
• Sufficiency:  Does the paper discuss the focused topic in every par.?  Where might the author helpfully build in further references?
• Sufficiency:  Does the paper contain an introduction, background, arguments, objections, replies, and a conclusion?
• Sufficiency:  Do the paper's arguments justify the author's sense that s/he is or is not majoring in the right discipline?  Why?  How could the arguments be strengthened?  In the argument paragraph(s), does the author handle the focused topic in a way that suggests sufficient competence and engagement with disciplinary thinking?  Why?
• Accuracy:  Do arguments support the thesis, objections object to arguments, and replies reply to objections?  Explain.  Could the coherence of argument/objection/reply be improved?
• Clarity:  Why does the author believe that s/he is or is not majoring in the right discipline?
• Complete the following sentence:  Thinking in the author's discipline is thinking about ____________.  OR:   Thinking in the author's discipline is __________ thinking.  Note:  Such a statement ought to be in the paper already!
• Importance/relevance:  What degree of importance in the author's life and education does disciplinary thinking have?