In-class or out-of-class peer review sessions are a great way to allow peers to tutor one another in a semi-formal way. These sessions can be constructed to have definitive goals so that they do not become a waste of time, but they also have the informality of conversation and commentary between the students themselves, before the professor looks at the papers. Peer editing sessions work best when accompanied by some sort of rubric describing things to look for in the other student's paper. A good rubric includes topics such as thesis, content, style, clarity and grammar, including several questions in each section that point the peer editors toward specific areas to examine.
Beginning with the thesis, it is helpful to ask the students to locate what they presume to be the thesis of the paper they are reading and mark it for the writers. This is particularly important because if reader and writer have different ideas on this point, it generally indicates that the thesis needs to be clarified. Second, students should be asked to identify how well the thesis expresses the main points of the paper and, inversely, if all main topics connect subordinately to the thesis. Many struggling student writers ar surprised to fined how much more clarity their papers can achieve simply by beginning with a strong thesis.
After the thesis is examined, it is easy for students to understand other problems with their papers through feedback from peers. The paper's content must provide substantial concrete support for the argument in the thesis. The paper's organization must follow any outline provided in the thesis. The style and tone of the paper are established by the academic nature of the thesis. Of course, good grammar just makes the paper more professional, causing readers to be more willing to accept the validity of the thesis.
Peer editing does help students to understand their ability to transform their writing into something better and to learn about their own writing by assisting others. The concept, however, might seem a bit daunting to students prior to a peer review session. In addition to providing and explaining a rubric, there are some other activities you can do to help students understand what they are required to do in the editing workshop.
One great activity is to provide a mock-editing session, in which the entire class reads and edits a different paper from another source. Suggested improvements can be called for from the class so that others can learn from the ideas presented. The other benefit of this method is that students get a chance to see revisions made outside of the context of their own paper topics, showing them that writing fundamentals remain the same with different genres, subjects and styles. Within this activity, students also can be asked to provide positive feedback for the practice paper, reminding them that telling their peers what works is as important as telling them what doesn't. You also can use a technological peer editing activity to help students understand the universality of being able to make effective revisions to their writing. You might have them add comments and corrections using the track changes feature of Microsoft Word, or you can find out what other kinds of technology are available at the college or university through which electronic "conferences" can take place.
Once you provide an explanation of what is required, model the editing process and allow them to see that they can learn about writing and new technology at the same time, students will be very interested in taking part in the editing process, learning more about their own writing at the same time.