a review of peer-review
by Malcolm Dugan
I am taking a creative writing course this semester, and we’ve just turned in the first drafts of our memoir assignment. I went a bit over the required 3-5 page minimum with what I thought was a pretty coherent, lucid, and dare I say competent first draft. I had to print out a copy for everyone in the class, plus the professor, which worked out to around 110 pages, so that’s like $9.50 at the Davis Center. Forget a cup of coffee that’s the price of a boutique farm-to-table-to-my-ass sandwich (with chips!). Each of my peers then read my piece and came to the next class with markups on the physical paper as well as a one-page response and critique of the piece as a whole. Now, I am all for crowd-sourced ideas. In aggregate, I certainly got some good feedback about what parts need to be clarified, what people were most interested in hearing more about, and the clarity of the general theme. But after reading all of these marked up drafts and short letters I came to the conclusion that these “critiques” predominantly demonstrated a lack of direction, poor prose style, and a general misunderstanding of the assignment. One person’s main complaints against my piece of creative writing were: that I failed to indent properly, although what is proper indentation in a piece of creative writing, I don’t know (we just finished a memoir that was Entirely left justified); that it was not in 12-point font, which in fact it was; that it was not double-spaced, please forgive me for trying to reduce my printing costs by using 1.5-spacing line spacing; and that I put two spaces after each period. This person actually felt the need to mark up my paper with these technical details, which are entirely up to the writer’s discretion, instead of providing any sort of critique about the actual text of the paper. I’m flummoxed, but what can you expect from someone who thinks that, “second most biggest” is passable writing. Some of my peers just failed to put any apparent effort into their critique. One such person waited until the seventh page of a nine-page piece to mark anything, then circled a description in which I describe the Atlantic as seen from Morocco, and write that it “Sound like Rhode Island.” No he did not use a period, or an s. One person simply left a short handwritten note at the bottom of the last page saying things like, “MAYBE IT’S CUZ I READ IT FAST BUT IM HELLA CONFUSED,” and “I DON’T REALLY UNDERSTAND IF THERE’S AN OVERARCHING MEANING. IDK IF THAT’S NECESSARY.” Ok so that last one is kinda useful but, I mean how much effort did that really take? And denying your own critique’s validity in the next sentence doesn’t exactly give it weight. Also, who writes in only capitals? One described my use of literary references to characterize my younger self as “kind of a copout,” but that seems like kind of a copout as far as critiques go. I had one brilliant individual take a single word and completely misconstrue the entire enclosing paragraph in which I am describing what is clearly constructed memory of the day I was born. The word was frame. They wished that I had incorporated the video camera into the scene earlier to prevent confusion. Are they complaining that I should have introduced a video camera metaphor earlier in the paragraph so that it would be less confusing when I wrote that everyone is looking at something which is “out of the frame?” Or are they confused as to why I don’t mention that there is a literal camera walking around the room? I don’t know because I never once mentioned a video camera. Oh and for a kicker, after this paragraph describing the day I was born in vivid detail, I write that this was “a useful lie which helps me to place myself in the world.” “What is a lie,” they ask? Probably the whole part where I am describing the day I was born as if I was there, right? Obviously does not do it justice. I mean I wouldn’t call my peers idiots, or say that they have the reading comprehension skills of 8th graders, some of them are putting in the effort to actually understand and meaningfully criticize the text of the memoir. Nor, however, would I accept much of their work as adequately living up to the standards of literary or critical integrity that one might hope for among one’s peers. Mostly it just isn’t useful or little effort is put in. I’m glad I got that out there. Maybe I won’t lose my shit in class if someone tells me the whole thing was “kind of blah.”