Peer Editing Sheet - Essay Three: Analyzing Visual Rhetoric

Brian Thill

Peer editing is valuable for several reasons. Your writing and thinking about this assignment will benefit from a thoughtful, candid assessment of your work by your peers at the drafting stage, and your writing and thinking will also benefit from the act of reading the works of others and seeing how and why they approach the same analytical task you are approaching in your own work. Lastly, good writing requires good rewriting, and the more practice you get with treating critical writing as an ongoing process and not just the creation of an end product, the stronger your work will be, in this assignment and in future assignments.

This peer editing sheet should take 30-40 minutes to complete.  Remember that it is important to get feedback to the other person promptly and well before the final draft is due so that the writer can use your comments in the revision process. Overly general or perfunctory comments in peer editing will lower your class participation writing grade.

1. Read through the entire essay. Mark the thesis statement and the central arguable claims of the essay as you read.

2. Where are this essay’s other main claims located? Are they clearly linked conceptually to the overarching thesis? If not, how might this writer begin to address that problem?

3. Where and how does this essay locate the vanishing point of Masaccio’s painting? How does it argue for the relation of this point to a fuller understanding of how this contributes to the meaning of the painting?

4. How well does this essay analyze the pictorial dynamics of Masaccio’s painting, particularly with respect to its spatial features: liner perspective, organization of figures in space, vanishing point, and other central terms and ideas from Prof. Herbert’s lectures?

5. How does the essay account for the position of the viewer and her relationship to the divine within the painting, particularly with respect to arguments about connection and/or distance?

6. Does this essay offer an argument as to how Masaccio’s painting is “forwarding a theological idea”? What is that idea, and how does this writer support it with sufficient evidence and claims supported by warrants?

7. What other visual details does this writer consider, and why?

8. How are these additional details (subject matter, figures, spatial relations, color, etc.) linked to the overall argument in the essay about how this essay’s use of perspective contributes to an understanding of the painting’s meaning? Are these presented merely as a catalog of features, or is it clear that each detail discussed contributes to the overall argument of the thesis and thereby stays focused on the prompt?

9. Are the topic sentences, thesis, transitions, and other central arguable claims clear and interconnected throughout the essay? Identify specific strengths and weaknesses in each of these.

10. Does the writer employ correct formatting and citation throughout the essay? If it does not do so in this third essay of the quarter, explain how and why this detracts from the authorial ethos of the essay.

11. How would you assess the completeness and thoroughness of this essay and its incorporation of all required components of the instructor’s assigned drafting processes: excellent, satisfactory, partially complete, deficient?

12. At this stage, how would you rate the following components of the writing in this essay: a) its conceptual understanding; b) rhetorical strength and purpose; c) clarity of thesis; d) development and support of arguments; e) coherent flow and well-organized structure; and f) quality of language and mechanics?

13. What are the two greatest strengths of this essay, and how can the writer use those as a way to think about revision strategies?

14. What do you see as the two biggest problem spots or challenges this writer is attempting to confront in this essay? What specific advice would most help them deal with these in the revision process?