"Peer Response: Teaching Specific Suggestions"

Jason Pena

Eng, 1301.28

Instructor: Trang Phan

9/13/2010

“Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions”

The article discusses responses pertaining to “teaching specific revision suggestions”

In middle school students, using the PQP, “Praise-Question-Polish, method.” This technique helps students gain confidence in their writing and also allows the students to focus on the task at hand. An example of “praise” would be; “The details you used to explain the situation on the fire were very graphic and believable, they allowed me to paint a mental picture of what I was reading.” Once that’s out of the way, ask a question, maybe there was a particular part of the story that you didn’t understand. Then lastly “Polish” it of, this means to make a specific suggestion for improvement so that the writer can fix any mistakes that had been made. The article states that different writers had different responses to PQP, depending on the different activities set up on the observation; some may have had more of an affect than others. “Total class, Small group, Individual work, and follow up,” are all ways that PQP can be used, so different writers will benefit individually from these activities. The ending results allowed observers to make the accusations that they did in the article, PQP is a fantastic method of teaching proper revision suggestions.

Q: If this technique works well for middle school students, can it be useful for helping other students in higher grade levels as well?

R: The method PQP has very useful strategies that I believe can in fact help any writer, skilled or unskilled.
Another survey should be done so that it can become a proven fact that PQP is a successful revision method. I myself as a young writer would like to use PQP because I know it will greatly improve my SQR’s and compositions, as well as anything else I can compose. This article was very informative and having learned about the PQP technique I feel confident that my skills as a writer will only get better, and I hope my fellow classmates benefit from PQP as I have.