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Michael Silva
ENG 1320/1301.158
Trang Phan
9/5/10
SQR 2
The article Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions is about a teacher “Nina D. Ziv” doing a study on how to make students give specific responses instead of vague or just general but useful tips. And from the beginning we have all been taught the PQP technique “praise: what is good about the writing? What should not be changed? What is good?”, “question: as a reader, what do you not understand?”, “polish: what specific suggestions for improvement can you make?” Responders then share their reactions with the writer in order to initiate discussion. And from all the study they found out that the combination of focused questions and PQP format did keep the students on task. Then they tried other methods or working on peer response with small group activity, individual work, follow-up, then drill. And this all lead to the better percentages in specific responses and lower percentages in vague responses. I thought this article was way better than the first one I actually enjoyed reading this one.






Q. 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 a comment to be specific?

A. Well in my opinion vague are the most useless comments that you can ever possibly get. It like if you have somebody ready one of your articles and there only response is “ehh” or “could be better” these kind of vague comments do not get you anywhere the just confuse you and make you ask yourself “what did I do wrong” and then that will more than likely lead you to a case of writers block, and that is pretty much the last thing you need when there is a time crunch. And the general but useful ones are a thousand time better than vague because it gives you a certain idea of what to do but it does not give you the complete answer. So you have a general direction and that is better than nothing an example of a general but useful response is “ this story is good but what is the point?” so in reading this you will look back over your story and try to figure out how to get your point across. And the specific comments are the best kind you can have you never go wrong with specific those are the most helpful you can have possibly have. An example of a specific response is “ I like paragraph two you explained everything perfectly I don’t think anybody could have done any better but paragraph three could have been better there was not enough explanation in anything and the paragraph was way to short add more details to this and spelling is an issue”.