Writing is often perceived as a lonely and solitary activity. However, no writer achieves perfection on the first round, and creating a community where you can collaborate, share feedback, and discuss ideas is always beneficial. Peer review is not just a course requirement but an essential part of the writing process that all successful writers engage in at some point.

The traditional definition refers to the review of an author’s scientific or academic writing by colleagues in the same field to determine the piece’s quality prior to publication. For the purposes of our discussion, we are broadening the meaning to refer to the review of one’s work by someone else, before being read by the final audience. For example, in a classroom, classmates review each other’s assignments before handing them in to the teacher for grading. In On Writing, Stephen King talks about sharing his new manuscript with a group of 4 or 5 friends for feedback before submitting it to an editor.

Having your writing project reviewed by friends, colleagues, classmates, etc. before it is finished will almost always yield an improved final product.

Writers can benefit from collaboration at several key moments in the writing process, including:

Peer review is often most valuable after you have written a first or second draft—as a prelude to revision—to help you determine which parts of your paper are effective and which parts need to be reworked. You want to receive feedback early enough that you are still open to making significant changes to your work, but not too early that it doesn’t have a clear direction. Writers will be much less likely to rework their ideas, rewrite their sentences, and reorder their sections once they have struggled through several drafts and are in the late stages of their revision. When done at the appropriate time, a peer review can really help the writer deepen their approach and anticipate how a reader will perceive their work.

Peer review is a collaborative process where writers exchange their ideas. It requires both parties to engage in constructive dialogue, where the writer and reviewer are honest with each other, ask questions and explain their reasoning. This creates a deeper level of engagement both with each other and the work itself. Sharing your work with someone is a sign of trust: you are trusting them with your ideas, trusting them with something you’ve worked hard on. You are also telling the reviewer, that you, the writer, trust the reviewer’s opinions and expertise to make your writing better.

Peer review fosters a writing community where writers of varying skill levels, perspectives, styles, and approaches, come together and support each other.

In the context of the classroom, peer reviewing prompts you to dive deeper into the subject matter of the class and take an interest in what your fellow students are writing about. You can learn a lot from reading a peer’s assignment. They might know something about a subject that you don’t, or cause you to think about a topic in a new light. Peer review creates an environment where students can turn to each other for help and guidance, prior to having their work graded by the teacher.

The peer review process fosters critical thinking skills — you are assessing what your peer has written to determine how it fits within the criteria of the assignment. Reviewing someone’s work helps you learn to read carefully, identify areas of strength and weakness, and evaluate how it can be improved. It reinforces your ability to recognize the various elements that are needed to produce quality writing. Furthermore, it improves your capacity to detect, diagnose and improve your own writing.

Because you are much less emotionally invested or attached to other people’s work, you are often able to see and articulate high-level revisions more clearly. On one hand, this means you are able to engage with the work critically and analytically. However, this also requires you to communicate your feedback with clarity, specificity, and sensitivity so the writer can use it productively. Therefore, peer review is another way to refine your communication skills. For example, you might notice an area of weakness in a peer’s work, but you have to be able to communicate what that weakness is and how it can be improved constructively. Developing your ability to clearly and effectively communicate your ideas about other people’s work is going to help you communicate your ideas about your own work.

One of the most obvious benefits of having your writing peer-reviewed is that it gets scrutinized by additional sets of eyes before it is seen by the final audience. For example, having your assignment critiqued by a classmate before the teacher grades it. Or, in a professional context, receiving feedback on your article before submitting it to your editor for publication.

In an interview, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson urges you to write like your life depends on it. Now, whether you think that’s hyperbolic or not, writing an essay requires an emotional and mental commitment. You invest hours of thought, attention, hard work etc. in order to produce something of quality. Naturally, you develop an attachment to your writing.

In On Writing, Stephen King compares writing to navigating a forest — when you write, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. It can be hard to step back and analyze the forest. After spending so much time focusing on the minutiae, carefully analyzing every element of your writing, you become so close to the project that what makes sense to you might not make sense to everyone else. Or, what’s glaring to someone else might not be glaring to you.

It’s extremely valuable to get an impartial and unbiased set of eyes to critically review your writing. Your work is much more likely to be clear, coherent and polished if it has gone through a vigorous peer review. Ultimately, the objective of peer review is to guide you when revising your work, helping you determine which parts of your work are effective as is, and which are unclear, incomplete, or unconvincing.

Whether you’re in school or the professional world, the quality of your ideas and work will be judged, to a great extent, by how well you can communicate to a diverse audience. Participating in peer review helps you learn to shape your written language to appeal to a variety of readers. For example, when peer review is part of the writing process in school, students are no longer just writing for themselves or their teacher. They’re subjecting their writing to a broader audience, which is an important transition from a school environment to the real world. Whether you are writing academically, professionally, or personally, it’s important to learn how to craft your writing so that it is engaging to a variety of readers.

When your work is reviewed by different people with different perspectives, you get different critiques. Receiving diverse and sometimes contradictory feedback from a variety of readers helps you recognize the need to make deliberate choices with your writing. You can’t please everyone. You need to evaluate the feedback you receive, weigh it against your original ideas about the topic, and make critical decisions in applying it to your work to produce the best possible final draft.

Your job as a writer is to communicate your ideas clearly in a way that engages your reader. The peer review process is very helpful in this. For example, in an essay, you present your ideas about a topic, formulated into arguments and supported by other sources. When you subject your ideas to the critique of others through peer review, you then need to reconcile those critiques with your own ideas. If you agree with the reviewer’s comments, great, apply the feedback to your essay. However, if you disagree with a comment, you need to think about why you disagree, and how can you re-formulate and re-articulate your ideas differently to clearly communicate them so they are understood.

As a peer reviewer, you are not evaluating your peer’s work as an instructor, but as a reader. It’s important to remember you’re not grading them. You’re trying to help the writer improve their work and produce a high-quality piece of writing. To do this, you must have a good grasp of what the assignment is asking you to do and think about the essay within the context of the assignment criteria. But ultimately, you’re trying to communicate your experience as a reader.

Your role isn’t to rewrite a peer’s work but to highlight areas needing improvement. You’re helping the writer determine whether their composition is engaging, informative, and clear. If it isn’t, point to the areas in their writing you are having issues with, and let them know why you are struggling with them. There is a fine line between making suggestions and telling the writer what to do. Remember, you are trying to communicate to the writer your experience as a reader, not rewrite their piece for them.

It’s often more helpful to focus on high-level concerns such as argument construction, sentence & paragraph organization, idea presentation, source usage and integration, style, voice etc. It is likely that you will be reviewing your peer’s work before they have a polished / final draft. There are bound to be plenty of grammar & spelling mistakes. That’s not to say grammar isn’t important—it is. But grammar is often the low-hanging fruit. A common mistake peer reviewers make is to just look for a few grammatical errors and then say their assignment is “fine.” That’s not helpful. Make sure you also focus on the other components of an essay.

Don’t be too harsh—it is not helpful to tear a colleague’s writing apart, and although you may have the purest of intentions, it will likely discourage them from working further to improve it. If your peer’s work is bad, you need to tell them that. But you need to do it constructively. Be thoughtful with the language you use to describe their writing and frame your feedback to build them up rather than tear them down. Consider the difference between these two phrases: “your argument is poor …” vs “your argument could be improved …”

It’s also just as important to let the writer know what they’ve done well, as it is to tell them what needs work. A good way to stay constructive is to also focus on the strengths of the piece, so they can build off something positive.

Be specific and descriptive with your feedback. Point to specific examples within the essay and offer actionable advice. Don’t just write, “I like the first paragraph” or “I don’t like the conclusion.” Explain what you find effective or ineffective about the paragraph. Instead of writing “I was confused by the third paragraph,” tell the writer exactly where you got lost, or what word / phrase confused you.

Your feedback should describe or explain your experience as a reader, with specific language, as opposed to simply praising or condemning your peer, or telling them how you would write it instead.

Your objective as a peer reviewer is not to advise specific changes the writer can make. Rather, you are identifying areas / aspects of the work that need to be improved, and providing a detailed rationale as to why. Use language like:

Descriptive feedback is often more detailed and useful to a writer than judgement-based feedback. To support descriptive feedback, frame your approach to your review to include open-ended questions.

Consider these examples of feedback questions:

It can often be helpful for the writer to develop a few specific questions / prompts for their reviewer to answer / look for when reviewing to focus the feedback.

It’s often helpful to begin by offering positive feedback about the writer’s work. It is just as important to identify the positive aspects of the writer’s work as it is to point out the weaknesses. It is helpful to reinforce what the writer has done well so they can build on it.

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