1. No matter what e-mail system you use for communicating, you must use the Winthrop e-mail system for attaching and sharing drafts. This eliminates the incompatibility issue. If you haven’t set up a free Winthrop account, go to 17D Tillman and set one up now. You can set it to auto-forward your mail to your personal e-mail on any other system but you must send drafts from your Winthrop (POBOX) address. No exceptions. If you can reach the web from whatever system you prefer to use, you can reach POBOX.  You don’t have to be on campus to use it.

2. If possible, you should send your draft as an attachment to the e-mail, but if that doesn’t work, you can copy the paper (use the Edit/Select All keys) and paste it into the body of an e-mail message.  If a draft is going to be late, e-mail the people waiting for it and tell them so!

3. Before you e-mail the draft, run the spell checker and grammar checker in your program to catch the obvious mistakes. (Sometimes these will give you “false positives” but that’s to be expected.) Don’t ask your classmates to do this work for you.

4. No matter what program you use to create the draft (Works, Word, WordPerfect, whatever), you should save the file in Rich Text Format (*.rtf). You’ll find this choice in the “Save As Type” pulldown menu box under the file name on the “Save” page. Please give the file an easily identifiable name—e.g. Rachel.rtf or Ward1.rtf. Rich Text Format is a format that is compatible with most hardware and software and will be our best choice. In the e-mail message that accompanies the attached draft, you should indicate anything that you particularly want us to help you improve.

5. Once you receive a draft for peer review, you should go over it carefully following the guidelines for peer review I’ll e-mail you. Insert comments in the draft, insert references to the texts,, write an endnote—make whatever notes you wish to help you offer the writer improve the draft. To make them easier to see, you might try inserting comments in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS LIKE THIS. You should print out a copy of the edited paper to bring to class, and you should also e-mail a copy of the revised paper back to the writer. (Hint: save the edited file under another name, then e-mail it back.)

6. Remember you are critiquing papers, not people. Instead of saying "You sound stupid here," say "This point doesn't make sense to me" or "This evidence doesn't convince me to buy your product" instead. This is meant to be supportive, cross-disciplinary help from one writer to another, and must be taken seriously. You’ll only get as good help as you give, so be prepared to read carefully and talk about your comments in class.

7. I am not a computer wizard. If you are having trouble getting the system to work, call 323-2400, ext. 4, and ask the wizards at the help desk. They probably know the answer. My guesses are generally wrong.