COLLEGE PAPERBUDDY IS NOW AVAILABLE!

Last month, I offered suggestions on ways college students can receive free help with paper revisions. One of the suggestions was to ask a friend to read over a paper and to ask him or her for feedback. Since that suggestion is one of the easier ways to find paper help in school (i.e., most students have a friend, roommate, dorm neighbor, etc., that they can ask), I’ve decided to make that the focus of this blog entry.

Similar to the peer-review sessions that you have probably encountered in high school and in college English classes, “friend review” is when you ask a friend to review your paper. You can ask him or her for their overall feedback on the paper as well as ask them to edit and offer suggestions for sentence-level mistakes (macro and micro revising). The following serves as a basic checklist that you can use when you hand (or e-mail) a paper to a friend for their review (or when someone gives you their paper to read).

Assignment Parameters

• Does the paper relate to the assignment sheet? (Does it accomplish what the instructor had outlined?)
• Do the introduction and thesis statement incorporate the instructor’s language from the assignment sheet?
• Does the paper meet the page-length or word-length requirements?
• Are there a sufficient number of sources in the references/bibliography/works cited page?

Organization

• Is there an introduction that is followed by supporting paragraphs and a conclusion?
• Do the paragraphs that follow the introduction reflect the order and structure of the thesis statement? (E.g., is the first paragraph following the introduction the first thesis point?)
• Are the paragraphs arranged in a logical order?
• Are there transitions linking paragraphs together? Do each of the thesis points in the body relate to the overall argument in the introduction?

Research

• If required to do so, has the writer incorporated enough outside research to support his or her argument?
• Are the sources credible? Do they come from reliable sources?
• Are the sources cited properly within the text?
• Is the references/bibliography/works cited page formatted correctly?

Style

• Does the point-of-view in the paper reflect the assignment? (E.g., is a thesis paper written in a third-person objective point-of-view?)
• Is appropriate language used throughout the paper? (E.g. Is formal language used for a research paper?)
• Can the writer replace any weak verbs with strong verbs? (E.g. “The party featured a live band” is stronger than “the party had a live band.)
• Are there any clichés that can be replaced?

Grammar & Spelling

• Are there any grammar mistakes that are repeated throughout the paper? (E.g., comma splices and fragments?)
• Are all of the words spelled correctly?
• Do the sentences contain the correct punctuation?
• Has the computer’s spell check incorrectly changed a word?