More detailed directions here: Descriptive Outlining Instructions (from Kim Liao)
For this Peer Review Day, you and your group will be making “descriptive outlines” or “reverse outlines” of each other’s papers. It’s called “reverse outlining” because instead of outlining a paper before you write it, you are outlining a paper that already exists. It’s “descriptive outlining” because in addition to outlining the content of the paper, you also describe the rhetorical purpose of each paragraph.
Choose whose paper you will outline first. For EACH paragraph, the other group members should collaboratively discuss two things/answer two questions:
- What is the paragraph SAYING? (One-sentence summary of the paragraph)
- What is the paragraph DOING? (The paragraph’s role/purpose in the paper as a whole)
The writer should write down what the group members decide for each one, even if the writer disagrees with their answers. The writer will then have a reverse outline of how their paper comes across to readers.
AFTER that, if you still have time, you can discuss other aspects of the paper as a group.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
