Peer Review Guidelines for Enigma Essays

Here are some suggestions to help shape your conversations about each others&rsquo draft essays on Enigma and its historical background. In addition to these guidelines, the general ones we used for the warm-up essays are also still useful.

Evidence and Argument

One of the main foci of this essay is gathering and finding evidence from which you can argue for a thesis. Thus, reviewers, one of the key ways you can help authors is by offering guidance on their use and documentation of evidence from outside Enigma and our class discussions. Is every fact that the author states either common knowledge, taken directly from Enigma or class, or attributed to an outside source? Are the outside sources thoroughly enough identified that you could find them? Does the author clearly summarize what each piece of outside evidence says, and explain how it contributes to their larger argument? Does that larger argument have a coherent organization and clear logical flow? Look for ways you can help authors make all of these questions have emphatic “yes” answers.

To organize your feedback to authors (or at least much of it), try to make a table or simple outline of the evidence used in the essay as you read it. For each main piece of evidence, jot down a sentence or even a few words about what the evidence says, another sentence or few words about how it fits in the argument, and an indication of where it comes from. If the author’s use of any evidence is inconsistent with how you interpret the evidence, discuss the inconsistency with the author. Similarly, if you see additional ways any evidence could contribute to the argument, mention them to the author.

Thesis

You can’t make an argument without having a thesis to argue for, so theses are important to this essay just as they were to the “Gold Bug” essay. Offer suggestions about theses similar to what you did for that essay. In particular, paraphrase the thesis of the essay you review, and discuss with the author whether your paraphrase captures what they intended. Look for ways to help authors develop debatable but defensible theses. Look for ways to help arguments and conclusions clearly tie back to and support theses.