Peer Feedback

Naomi got her draft back from her classmate, J.D.

Overall, J.D. said they liked the paper and thought it made some important points. But they also found the structure a bit confusing. In their overall comments they said: “You’ve got a lot of great research here! These sources give really good evidence that family meals have a lot of benefits. There were a few places where I couldn’t quite figure out how the paragraph fit into your argument. If the argument is that family meals are good for kids’ nutrition, some of this material seems to go against that, or at least make it more complicated. Have you tried making a reverse outline for the paper like we talked about in class? It might help decide how the paragraphs fit together.”

J.D. also made comments on the draft in Google Docs, which Naomi found particularly helpful. Click here to see J.D.’s comments on the draft.

Since their class had discussed the SPARK strategy for peer review feedback (Specific, Prescriptive, Actionable, Referenced, and Kind), J.D. tried to use these qualities in their comments and suggestions. Do you think they succeeded?

Reverse Outlining

Naomi decided to reverse outline her draft. She printed out a copy of the paper and highlighted the topic sentence of each paragraph. She then looked to see if there were any sentences in the paragraph that deviated from the topic announced in the topic sentence, and highlighted these as well. In the margin, she wrote a brief sentence expressing the meaning of each highlighted sentence. Through this process, she realized that some paragraphs actually made different points than she had intended! In the paragraph about picky eating (figure 1), for instance, she discovered that picky eating might not have much to do with whether families eat together. That was the opposite of what she thought she was trying to say!

Figure 1: Reverse outlining means going through the draft to see what each paragraph actually says (not just what you thought it was going to say).

In the end, her notes in the margin looked like this:

1. Family meals together have a number of benefits.
   • Research supports this claim (too detailed for intro paragraph)?
   • Health care workers are encouraged to support family meals together.
2. Parenting styles seem to have an impact on whether children ate non-core foods.
   • General nutrition knowledge is not a major factor in whether children ate non-core foods.
3. Maternal attitudes towards family meals is correlated to childhood obesity rates.
4. Picky eating is a cause of concern.
   • … may not be a factor in whether families eat together.
5. Families who say meals are of high importance eat together.
6. More studies are needed to separate correlation from causation.
7. Conclusion: Eating together is important
   • The major barrier to eating together seems to be time.

Outlined like this, Naomi could see why her paper was so confusing to read! She decided to reorder her paragraphs and try to improve the coherence of each paragraph.

Rethinking the Argument

After making her reverse outline, Naomi realized that she had a couple of paragraphs that didn’t really seem to support her claim at all. If her thesis claim was that family meals are important, why was she writing about parenting styles and picky eating? The more she thought about these paragraphs, the more frustrated she felt. She had done so much work– was she just supposed to start over? She shut her computer and stomped away.

Later that evening Naomi returned to her outline. Looking it over, she had a thought. She took out a piece of paper and drew two columns:

Maybe her argument was not just about the benefits of eating together, but also about why families don’t eat together. She sketched out a new rough outline:

1. Eating together has many health benefits
   • Discuss overall benefits (using material from draft intro)
     • Note that more studies are needed to separate correlation from causation. (draft paragraph 6)
   • Discuss childhood obesity (using material from draft paragraph 3)
2. To get the health benefits of shared meals, we need to understand what prevents families from eating together.
   • Lack of nutrition knowledge? No, that doesn’t prevent families from eating together. (Covered this in draft paragraph 2)
   • Picky eating? No. (Covered in draft paragraph 4)
3. Time is the biggest barrier to shared family meals. (draft conclusion)
   • Why? (have to research this)
4. What can families do to get the health benefits of shared family meals?
   • Prioritize eating together (As covered in draft paragraph 5)

New Research and Rewriting the Introduction

Naomi’s professor had told the class that they would probably have to do another round of research during the revision stage, and now she understood why. In clarifying her argument, Naomi realized that there were a few areas that needed more support.

For her introduction, Naomi decided she wanted to try a problem-solution structure. Rather than just jumping in with the health benefits of shared family meals, it seemed like a good idea to establish the problem first. Opening her second draft file, she wrote:

Childhood obesity is the most concerning public health issue in the U.S. today.

Well, that starts with a bang, but is it true? She wanted a fairly high-level treatment of this topic, so she opened a search engine and typed “biggest public health issues”. The first hit ended in .edu, so Naomi thought it might be a possibility. It was a list of “Top 10 Public Health Challenges,” but it was more of an advertisement: the list ended with a form to request an application for a degree in public health. However, looking closer, Naomi saw that the top ten list was based on 10 public health issues highlighted by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). She clicked on the CDC link and saw that “Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity” was one of the public health issues of concern for the CDC, but it certainly wasn’t the most concerning public health issue. If she just turned down the volume on this sentence, it would be supportable:

Unhealthy eating and obesity are among the most concerning public health issues in the U.S. today, especially in the area of children’s health.

She added a parenthetical citation to the CDC webpage: “(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017).” A more recent source might be better, but this didn’t seem like a very controversial claim.

Now she was on a roll. She drafted a paragraph that gave some statistics on the problem of childhood obesity (from the Department of Health and Human Services) and talked about how both public health experts and parents are worried about how to address this problem. Then she added the first part of her thesis:

One of the most effective tools parents can use to influence their children’s eating habits is to have regular shared family meals. Research shows that eating together as a family correlates to both physical and psychological benefits, including decreased chances of obesity and disordered eating.

So far so good: the introduction set up the problem (unhealthy eating and childhood obesity), then offered a possible solution (shared family meals). But Naomi also knew that she wanted her introduction to anticipate the second part of her argument, which was about barriers to shared family meals:

It can be hard to achieve these benefits, however, because there are many barriers to eating together as a family. As families and as a society, we can only enjoy the health benefits of family meals if we address the barriers to regular shared mealtimes.

More New Research

In order to make her point about time as a barrier to shared mealtimes, Naomi wanted to give an example of the kinds of time pressures that can make it hard to eat together on a fixed schedule. She knew from her experience working in the service and retail industries that scheduling in these jobs can be pretty chaotic; she also remembered that her Sociology class had discussed the problem of “just-in-time” scheduling. Maybe that would be a way to flesh out the idea of time as a barrier to regular family meals.

Naomi tried Google Scholar first, but quickly noticed that “just in time scheduling” seems to mean something different in logistics and manufacturing than in employment; all the top articles were about using JIT to optimize the manufacturing process.

A search for “Just in time scheduling” on Google Scholar showed that this phrase might mean something different in logistics and engineering than what Naomi had in mind.

A regular Google search, however, turned up a 2020 article from the Brookings Institution with the headline “Unpredictable work hours and volatile incomes are long-term risks for American workers.”

A regular Google search turned up a promising article– but can she trust the source?

This could be useful, but is the source credible?  A quick lateral search of Wikipedia found that the Brookings Institution is a think tank that is considered non-partisan, balanced, and reliable: “An academic analysis of congressional records from 1993 to 2002 found that Brookings was cited by conservative politicians almost as often as by liberal politicians, earning a score of 53 on a 1–100 scale, 100 representing the most liberal score. The same study found Brookings to be the most frequently cited think tank by U.S. media and politicians” (Wikipedia contributors). Using this article as a source, Naomi added a paragraph about just-in-time scheduling and the difficulty of finding time for family meals.

Writing the Conclusion

Naomi knew that she didn’t want to end on a pessimistic note. In their notes on her draft, J.D. had mentioned that the paragraph about how families who prioritize eating together tend to eat together could be a nice call to action in the conclusion. This seemed like a good idea, but paired with the material on the difficulty of scheduling it felt a bit weak. Naomi decided to take another look at the essay that was the basis of that paragraph, a comparison of “families who have frequent and infrequent family meals.” The article mentioned that one characteristic of families who ate together frequently was a “flexibility in the definition of family meals” (Berge et al.). Maybe this could provide a way forward even in the face of difficult scheduling: if a family prioritizes eating together—whether breakfast, lunch, dinner, or in between—then they are more likely to eat together.

Proofreading

Now that Naomi had a complete draft, it was time to start proofreading. For her first pass, she just used the spelling and grammar check built into Google Docs and caught a few typos and spelling mistakes. The grammar check also found a few places where the verb didn’t match the subject. Naomi had read through the paper so many times that she was sure she’d caught everything, but she decided to try reading it backwards sentence by sentence. As it turned out, there were still a few mistakes she had been reading right over!

Reading her paper backwards helped Naomi find a few mistakes still hiding out in the draft. She double-checked her formatting, then went to the assignment page in her LMS and attached her paper. She took a deep breath and clicked “Upload.” It was done!

Read the final draft here.