Peer critique can make people nervous. It can be hard to give honest criticism, especially when you don’t necessarily think you can do any better. It can be even harder to receive honest criticism, especially when you’ve work hard on an assignment you feel proud of. But peer critique is a valuable, even essential process for improving your writing and design skills. Here’s why:
Receiving good, constructive comments helps you revise and become a better writer and designer. But giving good, constructive comments is an even more effective way to become a better writer and designer. Once you start examining other people’s work more closely and identifying strengths and weaknesses, you’ll be able to apply the lessons to your own work. You’ll also realize we’re all in this together, and you’re not just creating for the teacher, but trying to communicate with a real audience of people, some of whom will agree with you and some of whom won’t. Read “How to Criticize with Kindness” to learn four strategies for communicating effectively with such an audience.
Giving good feedback means being a good Wildcat, so remember the CATS credo. To be effective and constructive, criticism must be:
Courteous
Actionable
Timely
Specific
It must be courteous to avoid hurting or alienating the recipient. It must be actionable, meaning that you should point out issues and problems that can be addressed or fixed. It must be timely, which means following the syllabus and staying up to date. It must be specific, so that the recipient knows how and what to do. It’s easy to say “you need to work on the fourth paragraph,” but much more effective to say, “the fourth paragraph seems to address two different topics: both cats and dogs. It would be more effective if you separated it into two paragraphs.”
You needn’t comment on everything you notice. Instead use what I call the “no SWeaT” method to help you identify the most important issues:
- The greatest Strength;
- The most important thing to Work on;
- Something to Think more deeply about.
The “one thing to think about” should substantively address the content of the piece. It could be an insight, a question, or a recommendation for further reading.
For some assignments, we will use the comment function to offer summary comments. You will either be asked to comment on a certain number of posts, or you will be assigned to peer critique groups. For evaluating prototypes, you will use Hypothes.is to comment on a more granular level. Since Hypothes.is allows you to annotate specific sentences, you do not have to restrict yourself to the “no sweat” method.
