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Rubric for Peer Writing Evaluation
The good news and the bad
news
The bad news:
Sharing with
another person something
you have written can be intimidating and scary. If you are unsure about
your work, having someone else read it can feel deeply threatening or
embarrassing, especially if it's something you've worked hard on. The
good news, however, is that this is something we all share. Getting
feedback on a work-in-progress reminds us that writing is a process,
and that every piece of writing, at every stage, has strengths and
weaknesses. The point of reading and critiquing each other's work is to
build on those strengths and correct those weaknesses as much as
possible.
Both sides of this process are important parts of the work you will do
in this course. Offering criticism, on the one hand, and receiving and
responding to it, on the other, are both parts of honing your skills as
a writer and critical thinker. The rubric detailed below is written for
the
complete draft of your research paper. Please read through it before
critiquing the website evaluation papers. Although not everything below
applies to the website evaluation papers, I think it will
be helpful for you to keep in mind, now and later, all the issues that
apply to evaluating a complete research paper. For now, it is up to you
to boil down the questions below to apply them to the much shorter,
simpler papers we'll be talking about this week.
Title
Does the paper have a title? What does it tell you about the
paper to follow? Would a more specific--or more general--title have
been useful to you as a reader?
Organization
Does the paper have a clear introduction, body, and conclusion? Do
these pieces fit together with one another? Does one or another stick
out like an afterthought?
Does each paragraph have a clear and unique point? Can you easily
identify the topic sentence in each paragraph?
Introduction
Does the introduction
explain the topic and why it is important? -- Does it articulate a
clear thesis? Based on the introduction, can you
restate the argument of the
paper in your own words?
After reading the whole paper, look again at the introduction. Was it
suitable to the paper that followed? Was it to vague, or too specific?
Did it make promises it didn't keep, or claims it didn't support?
Body
Can you identify the
major points of the argument and the evidence used
to support them?
Has the writer quoted directly from his or her sources? Does the number
and use of quotations seem to adequate for the information discussed in
the paper? Has he or she quoted too little, or too much?
Is the paper appropriately documented? Are footnotes missing?
Incomplete?
Conclusion
As with introductions,
there are many kinds of effective conclusions,
but all of them bring together the major ideas of the paper in some
way. The best conclusions will use the conclusion to emphasize the
overall point of the paper and, often, leave the reader some broader
point to think about.
Transitions
Does the order of paragraphs make sense? Does one paragraph flow into
the next? Is there a clear logic guiding why one paragraph follows
another?
Can you clearly identify the words, phrases, and sentences the author
uses to form a bridge from one point to the next?
Language
Did the author express his or her ideas clearly? Was the tone and
vocabularly appropriate for a serious, scholarly research paper?
Could the author have expressed his or her ideas more succinctly--that
is, with fewer words? (This is one of the most common flaws in writing
at all levels.)
Was the paper free of grammatical errors? Did the author proofread?
General
Did you like the paper? Why, or why not? What did you learn from it?
What else do you wish you had learned from it? What suggestions can you
make for improving it?
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