The Importance of Peer Interactivity in Writing Instruction

Having students work with other students has long been regarded in composition studies as a useful instructional process, at least since influential articles on the subject—written by Kenneth Bruffee, Anne Ruggles Gere, Peter Elbow, and others—appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. The principal advantages to peer interaction in composition (often called “peer editing” or “peer critiquing”) include: (1) students engage more thoroughly in each other’s writing than they do in textbooks or professional essays; (2) when their writing is being read by their peers, the student writers tend to concern themselves more with audience and audience response issues than when writing to teachers alone; and (3) most importantly, the discovery of critical factors in a piece of writing and the act of articulating them back to the writer is the strongest way to encourage an explicit knowledge of good writing criteria.

This last point needs some further discussion. The core writing concepts that a student may learn from a textbook, handbook, or in class have a very short half-life. It is only through a process of active discovery and articulation that such concepts have a hope of remaining with the student and influencing permanent writing habits. Textbook and handbook exercises designed to reinforce such explicit knowledge tend to lack transfer to the student’s own writing, mainly because the exercises seem mechanical and distant from the real act of writing for a reader. But the act of reading and commenting on another student’s piece of writing is immediate, unique, and even personal: one human being is reading another human being’s current ideas and expression and is responding as an act of assistance (although the notion of peer critiquing as “assistance” takes a little time to develop, so ingrained is the notion of school writing as a fairly bloodless and impersonal exercise).

Peer critiquing (as opposed to “peer editing,” or surface-level copyediting), is best managed through teacher-written prompts, specific criteria directing the student reader’s attention to explicit elements of the text. The prompts provide the clearest channel for establishing a conscious understanding of what effective writers should be seeing and deciding upon as they write and revise. If, for example, the teacher wishes the student to learn how to manage capable support for a claim, then the best way to instantiate that conscious and even self-conscious understanding is to prompt the student to find capable (or not-so-capable) support in another student’s document and then explain to the writer why that support is or is not effective. It is in the very act of explanation that we best clarify for ourselves what it is we presumably know. Firming such explicit knowledge through the acts of discovery and explanation, the peer readers can then employ the knowledge in their own writing and revising habits. The one most helped by the act of peer critiquing is always the peer reader, though as the peer reader’s skills grow, the writer is more and more helped.

Peer interactivity provides a concrete and helpful stage as student writers work through a drafting process. A draft is written, other students comment, and the draft is reworked according to the feedback. Such a cycle can be repeated as many times as the teacher wishes, usually depending upon the complexity of the document and the richness of the writing criteria the teacher is trying to convey through the critique prompts. This learning pattern reflects a general understanding of how organisms (or any other dynamic systems) develop: attempt, feedback, adaptation, reattempt. A peer feedback process allows much more feedback than any teacher could provide, thereby supporting the frequency and strength of the pattern much more than any teacher could sustain. The often-heard criticism that some (or much) of the peer feedback is in error does not undercut the process: attempts to make informed judgments gain strength through attempt and repetition. The peer reader needs to make such judgments, but so does the student writer when receiving the peer reader’s opinions. When a student writer reads a teacher’s comments, there is almost always no further decision: the teacher is presumably the expert and his or her judgments final. On the other hand, when a student writer reads peer comments, the writer must evaluate the validity of such comments, thereby re-applying yet again the explicit criteria of effective writing. In this way, the further negotiation of the commentary becomes a learning strength. Applying effective writing elements in the act of writing is a matter not of invoking scriptural truths but of continually making judgments that lie in very gray areas. Peer critiquing strongly encourages the idea that effective writing is more about making informed decisions (hence the over-used “critical thinking”) than applying fixed rules.

The main problem with peer interactivity in writing instruction is logistical. In simplest terms, many documents have to be copied, moved to and fro, and reviewed. Before computer networks, the logistical complications of copying and distributing paper sharply inhibited peer critiquing. Students and teachers were frustrated at the costs of photocopying, the piles of drafts and written commentary that accumulated, and the sheer managerial effort of setting up and maintaining the necessary channels of interactivity. But computer networks and properly written software eliminate the logistical problems. Computer replication and distribution is free and instantaneous: a single document can be copied once or a thousand times and sent to one or a thousand people for the same cost and at practically the same time. The software can accept the writing from the students in a password-protected form, direct it in an organized fashion to peer readers, display the critiquing prompts effectively, return the commentaries to the student writers, and save all this writing activity to a database for coherence and archiving (and, incidentally, for further reflection and improvement of the process). All this can be accomplished with a small fraction of the effort needed by a teacher using paper alone.

Computers and computer networks have often been criticized as “dehumanizing,” but in peer interactivity in writing instruction the exact opposite is true. Networked computers can act as highly useful communication devices, as “text telephones,” that bring people together through writing and allow them to work together far more frequently and productively than ever before. What drives the value of peer interaction is people, the very human judgments that effective writers must make hundreds of times in each draft, and the sense of sharing an effort and providing assistance that frames communities of learners.

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