PPR Paper: Product Types and Best Readers Workshop

        Form groups of two or three, and follow the guide below for your peer-editing workshop.  By the time you are done, each member of your group should have a rough plan for what kinds of evidence you need to find, and a rough outline for how it should be organized in the rough draft (due Friday) so that it will persuade the paper's best readers.

1)  Take about five minutes per person to explain the type of product you are exploring for the recommendation.  Think about features, and the uses to which the products can be put. 

• List the features and uses on paper, and then try to place them individually or in groups from "most important" to "less important" to "least important but still worth mentioning."  Save any features that do not make the cut just in case your best readers care more about them than you do!

2)  Then spend another five minutes per person helping each member of the group to explore more specifically what kind of readers could best benefit from the kind of product the author is interested in recommending.  Do not be afraid to be very specific in the best readers' description--even give one of them a name and imagine her/him reading the paper's final draft. 

• What will be her/his first, most important question about how the product will meet her/his most important need?  Then imagine the best readers' questions about their second or third most important needs.  That is enough to help the author organize the source evidence to form the "bridge" the best readers need.

        Before the workshop is over, make sure each member of the group has compared the product feature list with the readers' questions about the how the product will work for them.  Unless your best readers' typically would be mistaken about the product's most important features (in which case you have to educate them!), let the readers' hierarchy of needs govern the organization of the paper's evidence about the competing products.