SQR2

Hiram Lopez

ENG 1301.28

Trang Phan

9-13-10


Summary:

This article is about peer responses and the teaching of specific revision suggestions.
The students' responses to a peer's draft was all to typical of the way untrained secondary
students gave feedback on each other's drafts during their response groups. In a survey 560
successful secondary teachers of writing and 715 of their students found that many of the
teachers had trouble with their students. When it came to peer response groups, because they
had difficulty getting students to respond effectively to one another's writing. The results were
that vague comments rarely offered substantial help with their writing. So, for several years, in
other settings an organizational technique with other peer response groups called PQP. They
found this technique helped students focus on the task at hand, as well as maintain a positive
attitude towards the critique process. The technique required for a group members to take turns
reading out loud, this helped the students hear the piece of another voice to independently
identify possible changes. The responders would then react to the piece by writing comments in
PQP form. After, the use of these new techniques the percentages continued relativly consistant
for follow-up response groups.


Question:

What are the 3 catergories of peer responses and how is each one better than the other?
Response:

In the article the writer independently catagorized each student response as vague, general
but useful, or specific. The writer categorized these according to how useful each was and how
they helped the writer better their writing through constructive criticism.
Vague comments that were full of generalities, provided little to no specific direction for
revision. This made it hard for writers to get information from the critique because the
comment lacked the detail to help the writer further improve his writing.
General, but useful comments were still to general but provided some direction for revision.
These comments were more useful because they were slightly more specific but still
lacked specific details to further aid the writer in moving in a certain direction.
Specific comments provided the writer with specific direction for revision. These comments were
the best because the were the most detailed and aided in the writers process for writing becausde
he or she would know what to change or improve or change to further better their writing.