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Strategies for Teaching
with Online Tools
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How
to Write Good Peer Comments
Avoid Vague Assertions
Writing
useful Peer Review comments requires, mainly, full description and explanation.
For example, consider the following statements:
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Your writing is good.
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seen in the margins of an essay: awk
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Jane has a pretty cat.
If you had a test where you had to accurately and fully describe Jane's
cat, without making anything up, you wouldn't be able to pass it because
you don't know what the cat looks like, behaves like, and so on. You only
know that it is pretty. But pretty is a subjective judgment; what's pretty
for one person may not be for another. So too with statement 1.
It does a writer little good--for revision purposes--to say their
writing is good. What does good mean? And on item 2, if a writer knows
something is awkward, he or she will fix it. If they don't see that something
is awkward, hard for a reader to follow, then writing awk
will rarely help because awk
offers no explanation.