Tutorama: Week Thirteen: Responding to Peer Comments - Part 1

Introduction
This week's tutorial is devoted to helping you think about and make use of peer comments on your paper.

After working long and hard on our research papers, some of us may be inclined to dismiss our classmates' comments on our papers, either citing lack of authority ("after all," you may say, "s/he is not my instructor") or lack of understanding ("s/he doesn't understand the complexity of my argument"). This response to your classmates' comments is always a mistake. The objective of scholarly argumentation is to participate in dialogue/debate with other scholars so that we can provide new ways of thinking about the world we live in. To participate in scholarly argumentation is to become part of a larger community with ongoing concerns about the lives we live and the choices we make. If we fail to communicate our perspective on these concerns in a clear and persuasive manner, especially to those who have not read all the material we have on our topic, we fail in our role as scholars. So please take your classmates' comments seriously. S/he is, after all, a member of your target audience: a scholar who is interested in seeing what you see. So work to show other scholars what you see and why you see it that way.

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