Directions for Peer Review of first submission
Now that you’ve submitted your first section of your paper, you’ll notice that you’ve been assigned two papers submitted by your fellow students. Your job is to peer review these sections.
Peer review is a common practice in the professional world of writing. You invite readers who are generally your equals to read and criticize your writing in order to make it stronger and better.
Often students resist accepting peer review because of two reasons:
- they don’t believe that other students have anything important to offer, and
- they avoid it because they are afraid of hurting the feelings of their fellow students.
We will avoid both of these problems in this way of doing peer review. First, you won’t be asked so much about what’s wrong about a paper nor about how it should be “fixed.” Instead, you’ll be asked to address questions that provide a description of the paper. In other words, you don’t have to criticize a paper. Instead you will describe what you’ve read.
So, is it easy to describe? Then the writer has done something right. But if the readers have a hard time following the argument or seeing how the evidence works, if the reader can’t figure out what a paragraph is saying or what a sentence means, or your readers can’t seem to agree on what the paper is up to, then the description will fail. And THAT means the writer has a problem to solve.
Directions: Below are a set of questions you should answer about the introduction and the explanation of the problem offered by your two fellow students. For each draft,
- copy the questions I’ve given you below into a writing program document (such as Word),
- answer the questions in some detail, and
- when you’re done, copy-and-paste the questions and your answers back into the forum as a reply to the original post of the writer’s own draft. That is, at the bottom of the paper you’re reviewing is a button for adding a comment. Click that button and cut-and-paste your peer review beneath the paper.
- Also, consider what others have written about the same draft. Do you agree or disagree or both? Why?This is a discussion forum, so have a discussion; this is important.
Here are the questions to address:
1) A good introduction starts with what the readers already know — the standard views, the common understandings, the accepted ideas. What is the familiar views offered in this introduction? They should appear within the first two or three sentences, naturally.
2) Now, how does the paper make a problem out of the familiar ideas that the readers hold?
3) What is the source that the writer uses to show that the problem he or she is pointing out is real and not just a personal opinion?
4) What’s the “new idea”? In other words, what’s the position the writer is taking? (You might think of this as the paper’s thesis. What is the thesis?) If there isn’t one, say so here and why you think there isn’t one. What does the introduction do instead of give a thesis?
5) The statement of background gives us the most factual material in the argument. What does the writer offer as proof that the problem even exists? What facts (as opposed to opinions) does the writer provide? Statistics? Historical facts? Measurements? Describe them or note if there are few or no facts.
6) How does the writer get from the statement of background — the factual stuff — to the thesis? Do you think it flows logically?
FIRST PEER
Even though social media has enhanced the system communicative, its excessive use with smartphone has conducted teenage girls ages 13-19 to social medial addiction that generates anxiety.
The Downsides of Internet Use on Teenage Girls
The evolution of the internet has greatly improved today’s system communicative. In the article “Understanding the Emerging Science of PIU”, the authors report that with the advanced of technology, the access of the internet has become easier for Americans since 2000 anytime and anywhere (Breslau et al. 3). By this time, 40 percent of the American population utilized a “modern to “dial up” into a session on the internet” when 3 percent signed up for a high-speed connection (Breslau et al. 3). Later by 2013, the use of the internet with laptops, tablets computer and smartphones, has grown due to the extension of wireless connections (Breslau et al. 3). Adding to Breslau’s statistic, I would point out that smartphone has largely made the use of internet easier than any other mobile devices. However, the authors argue that the largest access of the internet and its range of online activities has generated a public health problem specifically among adolescents (Breslau et al. 3). In fact, they are not the only researchers who point out the Problematic of Internet Use or social media addictions, Nicholas Carr in “The Shallow” has described the negative impacts of the excessive use of the internet on people’s brain by establishing some statistics between internet user and non-user. Then, Nancy Jo Sales reports that social medial with smartphone has sexually affected the intimacy of teenage girls (Sales 26). In addition, many other researchers such as Twenge, Search and Schneier demonstrate that the excessive use of the internet has led to internet addiction and anxiety. Therefore, should the internet be considered as disruptive for teenage girls’ environment?
Even though social media has enhanced the system communicative, its excessive use with smartphone has conducted teenage girls ages 13-19 to social medial addiction that generates anxiety.
SECOND PEER
Thesis: Cyberbullying a problem apart from face to face bullying puts teenagers aged 10 – 18 at an increased risk for depression.
When children and teenagers gather, there is typically some form of adult supervision to ensure things don’t get out of hand, whether that person be a parent at a party, a teacher in the classroom, or a chaperone at a dance, there is always someone, to ensure that everyone is behaving, and that no one is doing anything terribly inappropriate or cruel. With the incredible surge in available technology, there’s been a corresponding surge in the usage of technology to communicate with others especially among adolescents. This form of communication has evolved so thoroughly, that entire groups of people can literally interact without ever even actually meeting each other, and somewhat worryingly, to interact without any supervision. This can lead to a problem that has been rapidly growing, especially in the last few years. I am, of course, talking about cyberbullying. Although it is commonly believed that cyberbullying is another offshoot of traditional “schoolyard bullying,” what recent research is showing is that this simply may not be the case.
First and foremost, what is cyberbullying? According to The Ahmet Keleşoğlu Faculty of Education in Turkey, “Cyberbullying is defined as the repetitive use of information and communication technologies by an individual or a group in order to hurt other individuals” (Dilmaç, 1120). It’s commonly believed that the problems faced by cyberbullying are the same as those faced by its traditional counterpart. In the aptly named article “Some Problems with Cyberbullying Research,” Limber argues that “to put cyberbullying in proper perspective, it is in our view necessary to study it in the context of (traditional) bullying” (Limber, 2). It is true , that some of the effects such as decreased life satisfaction and depression are shared between the two (Frison, 1755). However, this may not be the case. Her argument that cyberbullying should actually be studied and treated as an offshoot of traditional bullying simply fails to address the facts. Deschamps and McNutt, in “Cyberbullying: What’s the Problem?” discuss this very issue, arguing that this “has lead decision makers to treat it as a new manifestation of an old problem, even though these types of bullying are differentiated by a number of unique features including anonymity, access, scope, power relations, permanency, assumptions concerning victim versus bully, and distinctions between types of aggression.” (Deschamps, 51). My own view, in line with Deschamps, is that cyberbullying, what Limber characterizes as a subset of face-to-face bullying, is so drastically different from that of its face-to-face counterpart, that attempting to study it in this context can only lead to further misunderstanding. Cyberbullying, a problem in its own right apart from face to face to bullying, puts teenagers aged ten to eighteen at an increased risk for depression.