English 320
Spring 2002
Peer Review Questions for Assignment 3
I've put together this list of questions after reading all of your "lite"
drafts and identifying some concerns for your collective progress. Please
answer all questions, but when a question is particularly applicable to
the essay you're reviewing, spend more time with it. Remember that your
goal is to help the writer get published-so your comments should not reflect
so much your personal taste as your sense of how the intended readers
(editors and individuals) will respond to it.
The writer you are reviewing will have given you printouts of first pages
of one or two essays that the essay will "stand beside." You
can find the URLs and submission guidelines for your writer's site on
the course web page (syllabus). Together these documents provide the context
for this piece of writing. Familiarize yourself with this context information
first. Then respond to the paper.
1. Successful Web essays MUST engage the reader right off the bat, as
Web readers are impatient and have lots of choices. You all are familiar
with convention on some sites of putting the first few lines of an entire
set of essays on a single page-and letting the reader decide from these
few visible lines whether to click and read more. Whether or not the web
site your writer has chosen uses this convention, use the principle as
a guideline for assessing the opening gambit. In the first 3 or a4 sentences
is it crystal clear to you what the essay is going to be about? Will readers
want to read on? If so, why? If not, what do you suggest?
2. In order to do their work, editors need to recognize right off the
bat what the essay is about. What would you do were you editor of the
selected site? Why? Remember, no rewrites-it's straight to the wastebasket
if not immediately acceptable.
3. Read the writer's designated web guidelines carefully. Is the writer
in compliance? Might the writer appear to be in non compliance? (I note,
for example, that no fiction or poetry is accepted by Salon.com. So does
any salon writer's piece "look" like fiction in the early paragraphs?)
4. Readers want to come away from an essay with new information or new
insights. Mark the new information and new insights that the reader will
gain access to. Be very specific about what and where these are.
5. Put wavy lines under phrases that make no sense to you. No editing
at this stage-you're helping the writer "make meaning," so these
wavy lines are about making meaning not about grammar or style--yet.
6. Web essays have to move along at a good clip if they are to retain
reader interest. Mark places where your writer's essay is "moving"-that
is, where you're whizzing along happily, learning along the way. Mark
places where you are struggling to locate meaning. Use the following words
if you want: "moving right along" and "getting bogged down."
7. After you've read the essay through and responded to the questions
above, step back and scan it again, imagining you were reading it ON the
Web. To which phrases or words or concepts would you expect to be linked
to outside-site pages? For example, if the writer were writing about a
Congressional hearing, you'd expect a link to a government or alternative
media site about that hearing. You're all experienced web readers, so
you have "link sense." Go ahead and give the writer this information
even if the web site doesn't appear to accept links. The information will
be useful if the writer tries to publish the essay elsewhere.
8. Do the same as # 7 for images, but this time be very conservative.
Only suggest an image if you have good reason.
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