Providing Feedback to Others
An important skill to develop and practice is how to provide effective and meaningful feedback to others on their written documents. That feedback should include both what the author executed well in the paper and also how the author can improve the document.
Benefits of Providing Feedback to Others
Development of skills useful in classrooms and to improve performance
Providing feedback to others provides several benefits for you as a student, including:
- Seeing how peers draft their documents and seeing that there is not only one right way to go about drafting
- Being placed in the role of the reader to see how organization and style affect the readability of the document
- Learning to work with others on both providing and receiving meaningful and respectful feedback
- Practicing providing effective feedback that provides solutions to the peer
- Taking in feedback from peers, including evaluating whether to implement the feedback received
- Engaging in a type of feedback that is different from, but no less valuable than, receiving written feedback from a professor
- Transferring the process of providing peers feedback to providing yourself feedback
Development of future legal practice skills
Employers also expect that you will have mastered several of these skills as you enter internships. Alexa Chew and Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Bridging the Gap between Law School and Law Practice (January 1, 2015), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2575185, surveyed legal employers about nineteen types of skills that employers expected law students to have when they entered the office setting. Employers’ responses, reported as percentage who agreed with students having a particular skill, showed they expected law students to be able proofread thoroughly (92%), accept criticism and change behavior accordingly (89%), write using grammar and style expected of lawyers (84%), and work collaboratively with peers (83%). Id. at 7. Conversely, at the bottom of the list were being able to orally argue a motion (16%), being able to orally argue an appeal (4%), and being able to generate new business (0%). Id. at 8.
How to Approach Giving Feedback to Others
When deciding how to give feedback, plan to tell the author: 1) what worked well; 2) where and how the writing went wrong; and 3) how to solve the issues presented. To be effective at peer review, it is essential that you provide solutions or recommendations on how to resolve weaknesses in the document. Merely pointing out mistakes and issues will not help the writer nearly as much to improve the quality of their subsequent drafts. When giving feedback, you should be sure to recognize the strengths of the document and not just point out its weaknesses. You can always find a strong point in any document, and when you are providing feedback it is essential that you discuss what went well in a paper.
When providing feedback for others, remember that you are not a copy-editor, a close friend, or a competitor. Rather, you are expected to act as a neutral observer who is trained in legal writing and who is providing specific and practical ideas on what works and what needs more development within the document. Particularly if you are providing feedback to someone else within a class context, keep in mind that it is a cooperative learning exercise that allows both you and your peers to learn how to write and how to edit. Approaching this exercise with the proper mindset is essential to allow each participant to benefit.
Reverse Outlining
Create a reverse outline of the document you are reviewing using topic sentences and paragraph spacing as your guide. Note whether the document follows a traditional legal writing format, such as CREAC or IRAC. If the genre of document being reviewed would not use such a format, then note what the flow of information is to you as a reader. For any document, identify the introductory content and compare it to the conclusory content, checking to see if the conclusory content answers or references elsewhere in the document where the questions or issues that were raised in the introductory content have been answered. Then, confirm that those answers exist in the document.
Proofreading
Proofreading is what most people initially think providing feedback to others involves: you correct typos, punctuation issues, spacing mishaps, and grammatical errors. While this type of feedback is beneficial, a proofreading re-through is best for when the substantive content is complete and the writer is prepared to submit the written document. Correcting comma placement is not helpful if the writer really needs to focus on shoring up their explanation about why a particular point of law should be interpreted in the way in which they argue it should be.
Line and End Comments
As you are reading through the document, take notes on what is easy or hard to follow; what parts needed multiple readings to understand; what parts still give difficulty after multiple readings; and other quick notations as line comments. I usually will use the comments feature in word processing software to leave line comments.
At the end of the document, leave an end comment where you explain your reactions to the author, why you had them, and provide recommended solutions. Be sure to consider content, words and phrases, grammar, paragraph coherence, genre conventions, and strong points of paper.