Key questions for peer review of first draft

• Do you have a sense of why you should be reading the essay? (the “so what” question) What is it?
• Where do you see the student writer sharing his/her thinking about a specific thing that the published author does?
• Where would you like to see more of the writer’s thinking?
• Where would you like to see the published author’s text cited so that you can follow the student writer’s point more clearly and be more effectively persuaded?
• Do you have a sense of what all the pieces of the essay add up to? Where does the writer articulate this sense clearly?
• Does the writer help you get from one paragraph to the next so that you have a sense of direction throughout the essay?
• PERHAPS MOST IMPORTANT: Where do you agree? Disagree? Not understand what the point is? Not understand what the big deal is? What do you like most about the essay?

Notice that the peer review questions are not entirely generic.  They focus on some of the key writing tasks for an essay that critiques another essay.