The technique, termed "collaborative critiquing", was developed to teach fundamental technical writing skills to analytical chemistry students for the preparation of laboratory reports. This exercise, which can be completed prior to peer-review activities, is novel, highly interactive, and allows students to take responsibility for their learning. In a collaborative critiquing exercise, students read writing samples from laboratory reports constructed by their peers and, through an interactive discussion, evaluate the quality of the writing by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each passage. The second part of this lesson involves having students rewrite substandard laboratory report excerpts to practice writing in a technical voice. This lesson was believed to increase the class' ability to identify technical writing flaws and apply this knowledge base toward improving their own laboratory report writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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