Writers of late-stage drafts need help with first and last impressions, sentence construction, word choice, tone, and format (proofreading). Your job as peer reviewer is to call attention to the sorts of problems writers need to solve before submitting their final work.
Read the comments on the draft to see where you might look in The Everyday Writer for help when revising an early draft.
Late Draft
Devastating Beauty
Collarbones, hipbones, cheekbones—so many bones. She looks at the camera with sunken eyes, smiling, acting beautiful, her dress is Versace, or Gucci, or Dior, and it is revealing, revealing every bone and joint in her thin, thin body. She looks fragile and beautiful, as if I could snap her in two. I look at her and feel the soft cushion of flesh that surrounds my own joints, my own shoulders and hips that are broad, my own ribs surrounded by skin and muscle and fat. I am not nearly as fragile or graceful or thin. I look away and wonder what kind of self-discipline it takes to become beautiful like the model in my magazine.
By age seventeen a young woman has seen an average of 250,000 ads featuring a severely under-weight woman whose body type is for the most part unattainable by any means including extreme ones such as anorexia, bulimia, and drug use, according to Allison LaVoie (par. 4). The media promote clothing, cigarettes, fragrances, and even food with images like these. In a culture that has become increasingly visual, the images put out for public consumption feature women that are a smaller size than ever before.
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