More peer responses than McCain ads during a rerun of Golden Girls

This week I have been swimming in peer responses. I have had between 60-100 pages of student fiction and creative non-fiction to wade through over the last couple of days, and this will continue for the rest of the week in the MFA workshop I am attending. So I feel like I have a taste of what it is like to respond to a bunch of papers in a short period of time. I have a couple of observations coming out of this experience.

1.) My word, I am so much more prepared when I write-up one of those one-pagers! Monday, I did this exercise for six student papers. Not gonna lie-- it took a lot of time. But Tuesday, I just wrote page notes on the three 12-20 page papers I reviewed, and I struggled in workshop today to get my thoughts together as they were scattered across the text.

2.) Writing one-pagers takes time, but creating sub-topics for each response made organization easier. I started this tactic half-way through Monday's papers to break out of auto-review mode. Categories depended on the individual papers, but examples included:

• Character development or "Development of John (protagonist)"
• Dialogue strengths and weaknesses
• Plot inconsistencies
• Conflict and resolution
• Start and Finish points

Each category then had 3-4 supporting points, some textual examples, etc.

Obviously, these were creative writing pieces, but a similar strategy might be helpful for more analytical pieces. These categories also make discussion or conferences easier; you have a handful of thought-out and supported points at your fingertips.

I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I thought I would share this strategy.

Back to peer response and the distraction of the returns.