Lesson: The Peer Review of Elimination

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Contributed by Natalie Taylor, 2015

Summary:

Students pair up and take the pen to unnecessary sentences, phrases, and words in order to trim their paper down. This peer review session focuses on the practice of revision.

Description:

On peer review day, students came with 1 copy of their first draft of a paper. They were told they  were working on a 5-6 page paper and they were to bring 4 of those pages to peer review. When  they arrived in class, we had a discussion about how the writing was going and what they were  struggling with. Then I told them that their 5-6 page paper was now to be only 2-3 pages. While I  had some dramatic reactions to the new requirement, students were mostly thrilled that they were  now writing a shorter paper.

I paired them up and they traded papers. Their partner’s assignment was to read the paper twice. The first time, they were to make no markings. The second time, they were to cross out  everything that was unnecessary, repetitive, or irrelevant. If a sentence needed rewording, they  underlined it, but the main priority was to cross things out.

Then they discussed the changes, being sure to talk about the things they thought were working  in their paper and their reasoning behind cutting certain things. Writers were encouraged to go  home, open a new document, and start over with their partner’s eliminations in mind.

Goals/Outcomes:

While this assignment made me feel a little deceptive at first, I wanted to students to really  understand the real concept of revision. I wanted them to re-envision their paper in a new way  and learn that sometimes it’s best to write more than you need, then cut it down. The only way I  knew to do that was to change a basic requirement of the assignment. I also wanted students to  learn how to make their argument strong in a concise way, rather than focusing on “getting to  page count.’ The process of elimination was a little painful for some of the students, but their  papers were stronger after the exercise. They wrote more concisely, and I could tell they cared  more about their arguments than they had previously.

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