Guillermo Cabrera

ENG 1320/1301.161

Trang Phan

9/4/10

Summary 2

Citation: Author(s): Gloria A. Neubert and Sally J. McNeils. “Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions”. The English Journal, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Sep., 1990), pp. 52-56

In this article about Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions the author makes a good point about students that when it comes to revise a peer’s essay some of the students just write short comments on their paper. For example some students just write as a comment like great essay, needs more feeling to the story, but whoever wrote the essay doesn’t want just a good job in his revision he wants someone that could tell him what is wrong with his essay and if it needs anything. Also I like how in the article students from college got involved and made an organization called PQP to help does students from middle school and high school get better at revising their peer’s papers. That is one thing I have problems with is how to revise my fellow students essays. In high school we were never in groups revising papers we would just get a random persons essay and we were suppose to revise his essay with red ink so that he can make does changes that we gave him. My revisions on other people’s essays are vague which means that I only provide little or no specific direction I want to be specific.

Guillermo Cabrera

ENG 1320?1301.161

Trang Phan

9/8/10

Question: Neubert and McNeils categorized students’ comments into 3 types: Vague, General but Useful, and Specific. What are the characteristics of each type of comments? Why is it important for comments to be specific? Examples?

Respond: Vague is a comment that is full of generalities, providing little or no specific direction for revision. General but useful, is a comment that is still too general but provide some direction for revision. And Specific, is a comment that is a comment that provide the writer specific direction for revision. I think that when a friend peer reviews our paper he should be specific and not give vague or general but useful comments he should give specific comments about our paper so that we can know where we have mistakes and learn from it. For example if we would not give specific comments to our friends paper he or she would probably keep writing the same mistakes and get a bad grade. I remember when I had a partner last year and he peer review my paper he use vague comments on my paper which didn’t even provide any help to me or my paper, so I had someone else provide more comments to my paper and at the end I had a few mistakes and revise my paper with the comments that I got from some friends.