Provide Helpful Feedback

One of the guiding philosophies of this course is that a good writer is not someone who writes well. Rather, a good writer is someone who makes the people around them better writers. In professional contexts, making the people around you better writers leads to management positions whether they are with project management, working on teams, or reaching out to user communities. Unlike other classes that simply offer lip service to peer feedback, a significant part of your grade for the class will come from your commitment to how well you offer feedback to others that helps them improve their own thinking and their drafts. Doing so will make your writing stronger.

We’ll spend a good deal of time talking about how to improve in this area, as it is a key skill needed to advance in any knowledge worker career paths, and the particular procedures for our class to practice writing this way. Making other people’s work better is valuable but it is something formal educational experiences do not traditionally value  and, therefore, frequently feels like additional work. In our class it is not an additional burden but the cornerstone of how we will learn. Your ability to provide quality feedback is an essential part of your learning in the class and a better indicator of course engagement than any other measures. In short, you providing good feedback makes the class better for everyone, helps the class learn, and should be valued as such.

You grade will be determined by three factors:

• Your peer’s rankings of the usefulness of your comments
• Submitting those comments in an appropriate time for your peers to develop a revision plan
• Providing an appropriate number of comments on drafts

Each peer whose paper you will be asked to respond to will assess the quality of your responses across three rhetorical moves you will make as a reviewer.

• Description: The examination of the rhetorical element that calls out to the reviewer in the text. Where does it start? Where does it end? What is the writer trying to accomplish?
• Evaluation: A statement that aligns that element’s value according to the criteria /rubric of the assignment. Is it effective? Why? How?
• Request: How that element could be either improved or repeated. What, specifically, should the writer do? Where should they do it? Giving examples.

We’ll go into how to provide great feedback as well as how we’ll assess that feedback in class in great detail but for now you should know we’ll be using NCSU G Suite.

Still curious? Please check out more about the importance of feedback and improvement and rethinking and revising writing.