Each student will act as a reviewer, providing comments on another student’s paper.

Each
student is also an author of their own paper, and will receive comments from another student.
This worksheet contains instructions for the reviewer and instructions for the author. Once the
reviewer has completed their portion of the worksheet, they should email the completed
worksheet to the author and CC me (bbronner@gwu.edu).

Reviewer1
[Salman Alakeel]

Author2
[Jonathan Perlmutter]

Instructions to reviewer

1. Below, copy and paste the author’s thesis statement (i.e., the author’s statement of the claim
that they will be arguing for in their paper).

2. In 50-100 words, summarize the author’s argument for their thesis. Use your own words rather
than quoting. (If the author discusses and responds to any objections to their argument, you can
ignore those for now. Just summarize the basic argument — the thing that is the target of any
objections that the author may discuss.)

3. Does the author consider any objections to their argument? If so, for each of those objections:
in 50-100 words, summarize the objection and the author’s response. Use your own words rather
than quoting.

4. Are there any passages that you find confusing or where you cannot follow the author’s
reasoning? If so, copy and paste them below, or else describe them (e.g., “The last paragraph on
page 2”). If possible, explain what the problem is (e.g., “When you say this, I’m not sure whether
you mean x or y.”)

Instructions to author
1 i.e., the person who is filling out this worksheet
2 i.e., the person who wrote the paper being reviewed

1
1. Did the reviewer correctly identify your thesis? If not, then you need to make it clearer what
claim you will be arguing for. You can use phrases such as “I will argue…”, “I claim…”, or even
“My thesis is that…”

2. Did the reviewer correctly summarize your argument? If not, then you should make your
argument clearer. You can do this by adding signposting. See here. Signposting indicates to the
reader the structure of your argument (e.g., indicates which claims are meant to provide evidence
for which other claims, which claims are meant to provide specific examples of more general
claims, and which claims are meant to be objections to which other claims).

3. If your draft discusses objections to your argument: Did the reviewer correctly summarize
these objections, as well as the responses that you offer to the objections? If the reviewer did not
provide summaries that you consider to be correct, then you should clarify your discussion, such
as by rephrasing or adding more signposting.

If your draft does not discuss any objections to your argument: You should consider at least one
objection to your argument. Given the short length of the paper, you will likely have room to
only consider a single objection. I recommend considering the objection that you think is the
strongest, or else the objection that you think is most likely to occur to your reader.

4. Did the reviewer identify any passages that were confusing? If so, then you should revise these
passages, making sure to resolve any ambiguities, inconsistencies, or other problems that the
reviewer has specifically identified.