Peer Review of “Learned Helplessness”

Oct 5th, 2020

To: Kitty Yan, English 301 Student Writer

From: Adrianna Mroz, English 301 Student Reviewer

Subject: Peer Review of Definition “Learned Helplessness”

 

Having read over your assignment I found the definition you chose really interesting especially how learned helplessness applies to humans. I liked the illustrations you picked as they were clear and concise and helped guide the reader towards a greater understanding of learned helplessness. Overall, I noticed a few things that could be revised hopefully they might be helpful suggestions.

 

Organization:

The subheadings are great at directing the reader to your points, and the illustrations are really helpful.

• For your second diagram with the graph, I found it a little confusing to have it break up text and think it might be better when reading to have it placed at the end of a sentence or at the bottom of the paragraph

 

Grammar and Technical Errors:

The paragraphs were full of information and to the point, a few suggestions for helping to smooth reading.

•  The parenthetical definition seems a bit long, perhaps if shortened to something such as, “learned helplessness (the acquired reaction of intense feelings of inescapability to a stimulus)”. This might be helpful when used in situations where a quick definition is needed.
• In the expanded definition, some sentences could be clarified such as the second from the first paragraph to something like, ‘These set of dogs were confined to a box in which, no matter what action they took, they were administered electrical shocks”.

 

Details

The definitions are well researched and the references to experiments and case studies help illustrate that.

• For the expanded definition I was a little confused about what experiment you meant, it might be helpful to have specifics about who conducted it, where and perhaps an in-text citation would help to clarify the source of the information. Conciseness
•  In the sentence definition, some parts could be a bit more concise such as taking away any redundant words that do not add to further clarify.

 

 

Overall, these definitions did a great job of informing the reader about learned helplessness. It was well informed and researched, as well used multiple techniques in each section. I hope my suggestions helped in making any future revisions.