in_class: October 2007 Archives

Something Happening in Haiti -- The Onion

Wolf Blitzer parodied on Saturday Night Live

They smiled at the good and frowned at the bad and sometimes they were very sad. -- Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline

For the peer review assignment (listed in the syllabus as "Workbook 7"), I have provided these 12 peer review tips (not substantially different from the printout I gave you in class, just edited slightly).  Your grade for the peer-review exercise depends on the quantity and quality of the constructive feedback you provide to your peer. (So smile at the good and frown at the bad, but don't make your peer feel very sad.)

In the process, you will get specific, concrete peer feedback, which you can use to revise your paper (and perhaps raise your final grade). But for me, the real value of the exercise is that the experience of hunting for and fixing problems in a peer's paper will help you develop self-editing skills that you can apply to any writing situation.

It's one thing for you hear me say "The people you want to interview are all as busy as you are," but it's quite another thing to make the third or fourth or tenth phone call to try to catch somebody between meetings.  Much of what you previously knew only by studying new vocabulary terms or hunting for fill-in-the-blank answers has only now become more concrete.

We've covered a lot of material already, but now that you have had this field experience, we're really ready to learn about journalism.