Peer Review for Bloggers

I decided to change things up when I rebooted my blog:

In writing about working from home, I decided to have a few friends look through my draft before publication. I discovered that I really enjoyed collaborating with others to develop and refine my ideas. Which brings us to peer review.

Why peer review?

Peer review makes us better writers.

And not just writing, really. Coding too. Code review is a form of peer review that focuses on computer source code. Scholarly articles follow a similar process where reviewers are supposed to be experts. At my day job, we do all of the above, whether it’s the draft of a blog post, documentation, a white paper, or a contribution to our product’s source code.

If other people will eventually consume what you produce, it makes sense to have other people look it over first. More eyes. And brains. Specifically, eyes and brains that aren’t your own. When you’re working on something for a long time -- be it a passage, a block of code, or a collection of photos -- you get familiar with the content and you look right past problem areas that have been there all along. Those problem areas will stick out to a fresh pair of eyes that are unfamiliar with the work.

We’re intimately familiar with our own ideas and what we’re trying to say. Most of the time. It’s easy to make assumptions and to omit necessary exposition. An outsider can make a quick pass through, feel that something is off, and say, “there’s something missing here” or ask, “what’s the point of this part?” That’s usually all it takes for an author to realize what is missing and to make a correction.

Asking someone for their review is a nice way of showing that you care about their opinion: that you trust them to critique your work, to suggest better phrasing, or to tell you that it’s crap in some uniquely polite way. When someone asks me to review their writing, I always consider it a compliment.

For my blog, I’m less concerned with scientific rigor than I am clarity. I want to make sure that my exposition is clear and thorough. I also want to make sure I didn’t miss anything huge, the kind of errors or omissions that you look back upon and think what on Earth was I thinking?!?

A simple process

This is my process:

I can write anywhere. In a draft email on my phone, GitHub Gist editor, in vim, or even on a cocktail napkin. But when it comes to review, my words need to be relocated (if not transcribed) to a central place where the reviewers can access them.

I use Google Docs as a platform for peer review. It’s easy to use, accessible to anyone with a Google account and Internet connectivity, and doesn’t require anything more than a web browser. The spell checker isn’t too bad, either.

There’s power beneath the apparent simplicity of the Google Docs editor, especially when it comes to multi-user editing. Compared to sending a document around via email, everyone sees the same document in real-time including everyone’s notes and suggestions, which means merge conflicts are less of an issue. Google Docs saves time for the reviewers too since they don’t need to correct something that’s already been revised by someone else.

I create a new document for each prospective blog post. I share the document with two or three people, providing each the “Can comment” privilege. This allows them to add comments, but also to make “suggested” edits inline.

Peer Review Using Google Docs

There’s a varying degree of interactivity. Sometimes I follow along and accept suggestions as they’re being made. Other times I let the reviewers do their thing and come back to it a few hours later.

When everyone has finished reading, editing, and adding their $0.02, I go through and address all the suggestions and comments. Some I accept. Some I don’t. Some prompt me to write a sentence or two to clarify. All contain useful feedback.

For example, this document was reviewed by five individuals. The reviewers made about a dozen inline suggestions pertaining to punctuation, grammar, spelling mistakes not caught by the spell checker (i.e. a valid word, but not used properly), and mismatched tense. These type of suggestions are easy to accept or reject. There were also more than a dozen comment threads touching upon choppy phrasing, areas needing more clarity, the differences between em dashes versus parenthesis, and tense. These threads often result in a dialogue between one or more reviewers and myself. Compared to the inline suggestions, I find comments more difficult to process because they typically prompt rephrasing, reorganization, or cutting something out. Overall, just about every paragraph was improved upon due to reviewer feedback.

I haven’t felt the need to engage a professional copyeditor, although I do know of bloggers who do.

I make a point to acknowledge reviewers for their efforts (with their permission). They could have spent their hour taking a leisurely stroll around town, watching TV, or knitting, but they chose to help me out. The least I can do is say thanks.

Or review something for them in return.

Last Modified: 2020-08-09

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