Classmate Feedback

For our assignment over the weekend, we have to take one of our classmate's essays about their community and give them feedback. We had to explain to them, through a letter, all of the things that worked in their essay and would they could have improved on their essay.

I think that sharing our comments with the authors of our respective essays in letter form is a very effective method of expressing our ideas. After reading the Revision Workshop chapter in our course packet, there were reasons why writing letters is so much more effective with which I couldn't agree more.

Being a big letter-writer myself, I completely agree with the reading's claims that writing a paper for let's say, a history class is so much more brain-wracking than writing a letter to a friend. This is because you know who you friend is. What they like, what they know, what they dislike, what they don't know. With a paper there is so much more uncertainty. Who will be reading your paper? Will they know about your topic as much as you do? Less? More? These are all things that go through my head and many other people's heads as they write and paper.

Writing a letter to our classmates accomplishes its intention. It provides effective feedback in a not so intimidating way. By writing a letter to someone, it's providing comments and suggestions to the essay in a more personal and informal level. I actually found that in doing this assignment, I did not have much trouble with it for just that reason. I did it as if I was writing to a friend more than grading someone's paper for formality.