Considerations when Reviewing Texts

Considerations When Reviewing Texts

Thank you for agreeing to be a review editor. Since Writing Commons is unique in many ways—part peer-reviewed journal and part online book—we thought it would be helpful to provide our review editors with some of the characteristics for what we believe will be appropriate scholarship for our website.

Please consider the following criteria when reading texts. These are the characteristics that we especially encourage in our texts.

Focus on Students and Teachers as Audience

Of the following four characteristics, this focus on intended audience is most important. It is at the heart of our project. The audience should be college students and college instructors. We want students to be able to grasp the ideas in a published Writing Commons article.

Diction, style, scope, and purpose should be consistent with an audience of teachers and students.

1. Diction: The accessibility of articles shouldn’t be construed as a direction to avoid challenging language, but as a call to clarify and explain unfamiliar terminology to students, to educate students about vocabulary related to Rhetoric & Composition. For instance, a chapter on kairos would include a definition of the term. A chapter on “intellectual property” would involve an explanation of that term, as would use of the word “copyleft.”  
   • (Please note that you may add words to the glossary and these definitions will then pop up when the student or teacher is reading your piece).
2. Scope: The scope of an article should be something that could be applied within a particular class period’s lesson plan; or for longer pieces, the scope of the text could be consistent with the learning objectives for a curricular unit within a semester.
3. Purpose: The purpose should be geared toward praxis, an explanation of a concept than transitions into practical applications for writing. For instance, one chapter might ask, “what is kairos and how does it relate to my writing”?
4. Style: In terms of style, we encourage our authors to use an informal, conversational tone.
   

Use of New Media Forms

We are especially hopeful that our authors push toward a New Media format. We would like them to use YouTube videos, PowerPoint films, animation, podcasts, and webtexts. The length of such texts should be comparable to the amount of time that it would take someone to read one of our written texts. In other words, New Media texts should be about 5-10 minutes long in length. Another possibility is a synthesis of a more traditionally written text with a short video of say two minutes in length.

Potential to be Adaptable and/or Applicable to the College Classroom

The text being reviewed should be easily applicable to the college classroom. Authors should consider that instructors will want to adapt part of their chapters into handouts, classroom exercises, homework assignments, or fodder for classroom conversation. The use of textboxes, discussion questions, suggested activities, specific examples, or imagined scenarios for free writing or writing prompts could be especially helpful to instructors and students.