One way to gain distance on your draft is to ask classmates to read and respond to your work. Often, your instructor will help to arrange for this sort of peer response, and sometimes an instructor will be willing to read a first draft and give you some suggestions for revising.

If you are on your own for getting classmates to respond to your work, try these steps to get useful feedback:

1. Begin by telling your reader about the paper, and how you have gotten to this point. Give the reader a good sense of what the assignment requires.
2. Ask your reader to pay special attention to the parts of the paper you consider weak, but invite feedback to any part of the paper that catches his or her attention.
3. Tell your reader not to focus on details of grammar or punctuation, but rather on your ideas, the reasons you give to support your argument, and the evidence you offer to support those reasons. Ask the reader to focus on the big picture, not the lower-level details.
4. Listen carefully to any feedback your reader offers. Don't be defensive, and don't feel that you have to explain what you meant. Instead, listen quietly; you can decide later which parts of the advice to accept and which to reject.

If possible, get response to your draft from two or three classmates. Give each person a clean copy of the draft, and invite them to write on it and mark it up. And offer to read and respond to their work in progress as well. You may get some good ideas about ways to improve your own paper as you observe the strengths and weaknesses in other people's papers.

Once you have some feedback, you'll need some time and space to consider how to revise the paper. Spread out the feedback you have, along with a fresh print-out your draft. Mark changes in organization, highlight the sections that need further explanation, and decide where you want to concentrate your work in the revision.

You should be willing to make major changes at this point. Try not to be overly defensive or too attached to the first draft. Many writers find they need to change things quite drastically from the first draft to the second and third.

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