Peer Review: Invaluable or Invalid?

The whole idea of peer review of writing has always given me a sick feeling - one similar to the feeling I get when contemplating collaborative writing. I'll admit that I want it both ways. I want to be the smartest and the best in the group (so my ego gets stroked) and I want to be in a group with the most brilliant individuals (so I get the benefit of that brilliance).

But peer review needs to seek a middle ground. It helps to be clear about the purpose of the peer review. I am still surprised that people don't know the difference between reading and commenting, proofreading, editing, and evaluating. Sometimes when students hand me a paper and ask me to edit it, what they really want is for me to read it and then praise them. They don't really want to discuss the content, and they certainly don't want me marking on the paper with a red pen.

As a freelance writer and editor, I often get "proofreading" jobs which turn out to be complete rewrites of someone else's work. Most amazing is how people think that my "little bit of proofreading" has made their work exactly as they intended. But I digress . . .

Perhaps a good first step is to define our goals. For example, what does the writer want when she asks someone to "read over" her paper? Will this step in any way improve the paper, or is the writer just eager to share her accomplishment with someone? I don't believe that a "read-over" is proper work for a peer review group.

What is the writer hoping to get when he asks for proofreading? In the professional world, proofeading is a job - a very specific, technical job - and not everyone is suited for it. Writers should proofread their own work carefully and repeatedly before they ask others to do it. After the proofreading has been done, writers must make a commitment to consider all proofreading notes and make the appropriate corrections. Writers must also be thorough and consistent in applying corrections. This is also not a step that I believe is suitable for a peer review group.

Editing is as much an art as writing is. Some say that the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been nothing without the editing genius of Maxwell Perkins. I think their association probably reached the level of true collaboration. It seems to me that peer review groups can act as a many-headed editor, and can be enormously helpful to a writer. The editing stage is where you must ask yourself if you have fulfilled your aims for the piece of writing, and if you have done it in the most artful way, If you have not, you have work ahead of you.

Finally, there is evaulation, which to me means that the writing job is done, and someone is going to pronounce judgment on the piece. Of course, the writer may decide to rewrite (or burn the damned thing in the fireplace!) after evaulation, but that would be a new process. Our writing will be evaluated at some point, and it is never really finished. There comes a time when we have to decide to move on to something else and let earlier works lie as they are.