Peer Critique of Student Essays

Advocates of cooperative learning and of a process approach to writing agree that students can benefit from reading and critiquing each other's papers, provided they are taught how to do a good job of it, and are held somehow accountable for the task.

Here you will find several documents that can help guide students through effective peer critiques of their classmates' writing, and that you can use to credit and/or evaluate their participation. (If students hand in the completed Global and Local critique sheets with their final drafts, you have a record of their classmates' participation to grade or simply count on a credit/no credit basis.)

There are three sets of Revision Prompts, one Global, two Local, and one Enthymemic. The Global Revision prompts ask questions appropriate for an earlier draft of the paper; the Local Revision prompts ask questions appropriate to a more finished piece of writing; the Enthymemic Revision prompts ask questions specific to the logical core of an argument.

In addition to the Prompts themselves are documents explaining how to answer the questions posed by the Global and Local prompts. You may wish to direct your students to the prompts and the explanations, print them out for your students, or use the prompts as a starting point for your own set of prompts more appropriate to the particular writing assignment you design for your particular course.