Week 6 Workshop: Peer review: Meaning Autopsy drafts

Bringing a draft autopsy to be read by someone other than yourself, a week before it's due.

Field session

30 August 2027

A written autopsy is easy to get right in your own head and wrong on the page — the connections feel obvious to the person who lived them and often aren’t obvious to a reader starting cold. This is the one workshop in the semester built entirely around outside eyes.

Before the workshop#

Bring a complete draft, even a rough one. A half-finished draft is more useful here than a polished paragraph or two — reviewers need to see the whole shape of the argument.

In the workshop#

Paired review, swapped twice. Each reader is asked one specific question: where does this draft’s interpretation go further than the evidence it’s presented? Not “is this well written” — specifically, where is the leap.

Afterwards#

Revise before the Meaning Autopsy is due at the end of week 7. The most common change students make after this session is cutting a paragraph that was doing more interpreting than describing.