Q & R 3: What are the factors that interfere with the effectiveness of peer-response activities?

Peer-response activities should be helpful for everyone, but these kinds of activities do not always work out so well. I believe that there are two factors that interfere when it comes to the helpfulness and effectiveness of such activities and to improve writing.
One of these factors is the will the author of the text that is going to be commented on has to accept and take into account the comments when revising the paper. The author may not like the comments or think that they are not good enough for the revision, and he will decide not to pay attention to them. Sometimes, peers can make very good and specific comments that will surely be great to improve the text, but the author may not take them into account, thus lacking the possibility of making his or her text a better one. I get identified with this case because I do not always take the suggestions my peers give me. I only get the ones I consider will make my text better. On the other side, the author may like the comments and, as Neubert and McNelis say, “when students receive concrete suggestions for revision, they do revise with the suggestions in mind” (52,Peer Response.). The author does take the comments into account to improve the text, but it is the author’s final decision of whether or not to take the comments or suggestions.
The other factor that interferes is the quality and effectiveness of the comments the peers offer during the activity. As Neubert and McNelis mentioned, “the students complained about the writing responses, saying that their peers rarely offered substantial help with their writing” (52, Peer Response). If the peers do not provide the author with specific or at least useful comments, they will confuse and mislead him or her instead of helping.
As a solution for this, Neubert and McNelis propose that students have to provide the writer with specific comments, tell why it is necessary to revise certain sentences or paragraphs, thus giving specific direction for revision (54 Learning through Response). It is true that, as Gillam say, “peer response benefits the respondent as much as the one to whom the response is directed” (98, Learning through Response), but I think that if the factors mentioned before are present during the activity, both the respondent and the writer will be affected.
These articles made me realize that I have not been giving good comments to my peers during the workshops, and it is a shame because I am not making them any good. It also made me realize that I really need to start giving specific suggestions to my peers so that I can help them with their writing.
Both factors I mentioned do not allow the peer-response activities to be effective. Thus, it is very important to put more effort in every activity so that everyone can learn.