Peer Review: An Example

Summary

Throughout the Technical Writing course, we completed peer reviews for various assignments in our writing teams. The main purpose of a peer review is to provide feedback on writing style, flow, grammar and content clarity. It can be difficult to spot errors or areas for improvement in your own writing, so having a peer see the work with fresh eyes can help improve the final product. The following is an example of a Peer Review document, the most extensive one written in this course. I reviewed my team member’s draft formal report, and organized my review such that each heading and subheading directly mirrors that of my peer’s report. Creating a custom template that mirrors the original document helps the reviewer and the recipient to easily navigate the review and implement suggestions they find useful.

Peer Review of Draft Formal Report

TO: Erin Grace
FROM: Shakti Ramkumar
DATE: Dec 3^rd, 2018
SUBJECT: Peer Review of Formal Report Draft

Dear Erin,

Thank you for your work writing and conducting research on “Increasing Cost Effectiveness while Maintaining Quality at Farmer’s Apprentice Restaurant: A Comparative Analysis.” Upon reviewing the document, the following suggestions for each section are provided to help improve clarity and focus on the intended audience, as well as tips for formatting. The Peer Review has also been sent to you as a Word document in an email, as it may be more readable in that format. Hopefully this review helpful in preparing your final report.

GENERAL FEEDBACK

The greatest strength of the report is its focused and specific topic, which has allowed you dive deep in your surveys and analysis to pinpoint appropriate solutions. The overall design and style of the report are very clear and graphics are used effectively to convey pertinent information.

SPECIFIC FEEDBACK

Title Page:

A clear title
Author’s name and reader’s name
The date
Clear identification that this is a draft

Follows the sections of the report
One suggestion is to format the Table of Contents so that subheadings are indented one level to the right of the main heading to make it easier to read. An easy way to do this is by highlighting section titles in your report and formatting them as Heading 1 (for main heading), Heading 2 (for next subheading – for example, “Staff Surveys” and “Customer Surveys”) and Heading 3 (“Staff Work Satisfaction”, for example). If the titles in the report are formatted this way, when you update the Word-generated Table of Contents it should do the indenting appropriately.

INTRODUCTION

Background:

This introduction was very helpful for someone unfamiliar with restaurant practices. However when drafting the final report, the reader will be the General Manager Farmer’s Apprentice, so shortening the ‘Background’ section could orient it more towards a reader who is already familiar with this restaurant or the restaurant business in general. Considering the question from the Instructor’s Blog, “does my reader already know this information?” could be helpful.
The final paragraph on significant financial strain is direct and well-written and conveys the challenges you will address in this report.

Purpose and Scope:

Listing the “3 major topics” in either bullet form or as you did in the introduction with numbers in parentheses could help visually make it easier to read.
The purpose is clearly stated, and is realistic and specific.

Methods of Research:

The first two sentences “58 customers of Farmer’s Apprentice…” and “28 staff members…” could be rephrased so that they begin with words rather than numbers, to follow best principles in formal writing. A suggested rewrite could be “A survey was conducted among 58 customers…” and “A survey of 28 staff members was created to analyze…”
If you plan to include the Interview Questions in the final report, this section could be a good place to point to that part of the Appendix.
The secondary research section is well-written.

Limitations:

This section was very informative and highlights some of the greater challenges in addressing the issue of customer service and staff satisfaction. If it is difficult to collect information for you as a researcher, it must present the same challenges to upper management at these businesses for them to accurately assess how their business is performing in various aspects.
One suggestion for this section is to differentiate between the first set of limitations that has to do with customers and staff feeling uncomfortable, and the second set of limitations which is the sample size. The reason for this is the sample size (theoretically) could be increased simply with additional time, whereas the first limitation is more difficult to avoid for researchers like yourself and requires its own solution.
This section could also be moved towards the end of the report, rather than in the Introduction.

DATA SECTION

Great introduction that identifies the timeframe the surveys and reiterates the sample size.
The sentence “As aforementioned there were limitations with the research, but enough data was successfully collected to inform the recommendations” could be removed to make this introduction more concise, but also because it downplays the really impressive amount and quality of data collected and visualized in the next sections.

Staff Surveys:

First sentence summarizes the survey results generally, which is good.
This paragraph could be removed: As Figure 1 illustrates, most staff felt either very satisfied (50%) or satisfied (32%) at work with staff incentives as the most common indicator (46%) (see Figure 2). Other sources of work satisfaction were: quality of product and integrity of the restaurant (29%), customers (11%) and other (14%) (see Figure 2). The reason for this is that the graphics provide a very clear breakdown of the percentages, which are much more accessible to the reader presented in a visual format as you have done than in sentences. Following our instructions to “assume your reader is a very busy person”, the subsequent visuals are more helpful.
Instead a shorter sentence could just say “Staff were asked to rate their general work satisfaction (see Figure 1) and source of work satisfaction (see Figure 2)”.
Figures are clearly labeled and effectively deployed to convey important information.
Similar to the layout of Figures 1-3, Figures 4 and 5 would benefit from a layout where they are directly beside the text explaining that figure, rather than placed on their own.

Customer Surveys:

This section is concise, and the Figures are impressive and helpful to understanding.
Figures are not labeled in this section, so just a reminder for the final report.
Summary paragraph is great.

Interview with Carlin Sandor:

Bullet points are an effective way to convey information learned from the interview.
One suggestion in proofreading for the final report is to ensure that as much as possible, bullet points start with the same tenses/types of words. For example, under Staff Incentives, there is currently both “Possibility to scale back staff trips/parties” and “Possible to reduce staff meals”.
- Under Financial Wellbeing “Unsure where to direct…” and under Economical Products “Not sure that it would…”
- Standardizing these words would improve the flow of this section.
Avoiding big chunks of text and inserting bullets or a numbered list produces an easier to read document.

CONCLUSION

Summary of Findings:

This section clearly summarizes the findings from the three forms of primary research conducted.
Secondary research hasn’t been addressed so far after being mentioned in the beginning of the report, but in the final draft, there could also be a paragraph summarizing the secondary research and your main findings from that.

Recommendations:

Great use of “YOU” language.
Subheadings are used in effective ways to break up text
The solutions to lower inventory levels and eliminating a repetitive schedule are specific and focused, and achievable.
The citation to “Laube and Erickson” indicates secondary research, but unclear how this research influenced the recommendations.

Overall, this report provides specific and valuable recommendations that could be implemented by Farmer’s Apprentice. There is a wealth of data collected and displayed, which are persuasive to the reader in leading to the same conclusions. To summarize, re-formatting the Table of Contents to more clearly display subheadings would make it faster for the reader to identify relevant sections of the report. Including findings from secondary research, and a list of references in MLA format would follow through from the stated Methods of Research. Finally, orienting the Background section to a less general reader and towards Carlin Sandor specifically would improve the conciseness of that section.

I really enjoyed reading this report, and learned a lot about restaurant management and the challenges and opportunities to improve financial efficiency at service-oriented businesses. I hope that my suggestions are useful in creating your final draft.

Best,
Shakti