3. Does it identify 3-4 people or events that have influenced his/her life?

4. Does it include references to songs (and song lyrics) throughout the paper?

5. Does it have the proper formatting? (If the paper is already typed)

6. Does the introduction include an effective hook? If not, what is the most interesting aspect of the paper? This may be utilized so that the author can turn this into a proper hook.

7. Ask the author of the paper to identify his/her thesis statement.

8. Does it include WHAT, HOW, and WHY? Underline the WHAT, circle the HOW, and put a box around the WHY. If you have trouble doing this, then there is likely a problem.

9. Ask any questions or offer any suggestions for the thesis statement.

10. Next, ask the author of the paper to identify his/her topic sentences.

11. Do they indicate what the main topic of each paragraph is going to be? (List numbers of paragraphs where the topic sentence does not.)

12. Do they connect back to the thesis statement? (List numbers of paragraphs that do not.)

13. Offer a suggestion for one topic sentence to make it more effective.

14. Do the body paragraphs include specific examples?

15. Does each example support the thesis statement? (List numbers of paragraphs where they do not.)

16. Are the examples easy to understand and descriptive enough to provoke interest?

17. (Pick one that is done well and one that could be improved upon.)

18. How is the paper organized?

19. Does each paragraph only discuss one main point/example? (List numbers of paragraphs that do not.)

20. Are there any places in the paper where you were confused?

21. Mark them.

22. Offer any suggestions for a better way to organize the paper. Say, for instance, would it be more effective to change the order of the examples? Why or why not?

23. Talk about the conclusion.

24. Does it do more than just summarize or restate what’s already been said?

25. Offer any suggestions on how it could be made more interesting and/or more effective at answering the “so what” question.

26. Do you see any major grammatical or spelling errors? Point out one example of each type that you see and offer a suggestion of how he/she might could fix the problem. (Look for errors with commas, spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, semi-colons, subject/verb agreement, pronoun/antecedent agreement, vague pronoun usage, and especially run-on sentences and sentence fragments.)