SQR-2

SUMMARY:

In the article the Neubert and McNelis, the authors, mainly focus on peer revision and how the student doesn’t really help each other with the response they give to their classmates. This is because the student just gives the classmate a general response but doesn’t tell the other what is wrong with the paper. To solve this problem the authors came up with a technique that will help the students during peer editing. They call this the PQP which stands for Praise-Question-Polish; they explained step by step so everyone could be able to understand it and apply it to their writing. When they did this with students they saw an improvement but it wasn’t that big. Afterwards they continued this experiment with the same students and saw that the students were giving the peers full response by telling them what was good or bad in their writing. They categorized the response of the students as VAGUE, GENERAL BUT USEFUL and SPECIFIC. At the end this technique were very successful.
Gloria A. Neubert and Sally J. McNelis; “Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions”; The English Journal, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Sept., 1990), pp. 52-56

QUESTION:
Neubert and McNelis categorized students’ comments into 3 types: Vague, General but Useful, and Specific. What are the characteristics of each type of comments? Why is it important for comments to be specific? Examples?
REPONSE:
The authors categorize the student comments toward their peers writing into three type in order to tell the reader what are the right comments one should be able to put when doing peer editing. Vague is the comment that the student give toward their peers in which provides little or no specific direction in the revision. An example of a vague comment is “It’s a good composition” but it doesn’t really help the writer because it doesn’t exactly say what is good about what they have written. General but not specific is the other category of students comments in which it provides some direction in the revision of the composition. An example of this is “paragraph two needs more detail” in this comment it gives you a direction of what need to be improved but not the specific thing. Specific is the last of the three types of comments in this the student gives the exact direction of what needs to be revised. An example of this is “you need to clarify what type of food and describe it” . It is very important to be specific when commenting because it can help your peers to improve their writing.