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This essay aims to explore the widely varying terminology associated with a typical classroom activity, peer review.
In two-year college writing classrooms and beyond, peer review1 is one of the most widely used tools for helping students improve their writing. Despite its widespread usage, however, it is one of the most diffuse, inconsistent, and ambiguous practices associated with writing instruction.What instructors typically refer to as "peer review" usually entails asking students to read and comment on their peers' papers. That is about as common a description of the activity as is possible, though. In fact, what instructors have students do during peer review varies considerably along several organizational and purpose spectra: pairs or small groups; structured or unstructured sessions; worksheet or discussion-based focus; emphasis on editing for surface-level errors or emphasis on larger, more holistic matters; and so forth. With so much variation in organization and approach, it is clear that no community-wide, common understanding of what peer review is-or what it should accomplish-currently exists.
This is not a new concern, though. Anne Ruggles Gere acknowledges the widespread ambiguity of peer review and peer review-like practices in her 1987 book Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Gère notes that most writing instructors assume that peer review-like activities were born in the 1960s out of the work of scholars like Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Donald Murray; instead, Gère delineates the unexpectedly long history (a history that stretches back, far beyond the 1960s) of such student-centered learning practices. Even twenty years after Gere's recounting of it, the history of peer review often remains unquestioned and unspecified, as do many other aspects associated with such activities (or, as Gère calls them, "writing groups"), including terminology. Gere introduces her book by acknowledging the numerous terms used to describe this activity: "the phenomenon has nearly as many names as people who employ it. The name, of course, matters less than what it describes, which is responding to one another's work" (1). Like Gere, we agree that the lack of a common understanding of peer-review practices is problematic for the field; however, unlike Gere, we contend that the terminology used to describe those practices is, in fact, of crucial importance. Especially in a situation where the activity being described...