The short story you are peer editing needs to be evaluated in six areas: use of time, use of exposition and narration, character change or growth, style, aesthetics and local concerns. This editing sheet will help you direct your attention to each area by asking you to look for specific areas of the story you are reading. This editing guide will not help you sharpen your analytic skill, or help the author  whose work you are reading, unless you are willing to really concentrate on the story. There is no way to do this quickly.

I. Time
A. How much time does this story cover specifically?
B. Is the spread of time too long for you to empathize in any individual way with the protagonist?
C. Mark in the margins each of these areas of time use: Compressed time (summarized action), Real time (dialogue or move by move accounts of what some one does), Exploded time (moments of action slowed down to deepen detail or suspense), Stopped time (exposition or info dump), Non-sequential time (flashbacks or out of chronological order events), White space time (time passing but no mention of it).
D. Suggest areas where a different kind of time would make the story work better for you.

II. Narration and Exposition
A. Mark the areas where the story is dramatized (action occurs in the "now" of the story).
B. Estimate what percentage of the story is dramatization.
C. Are the scenes which ought to be dramatized, dramatized?
D. Suggest areas where dramatization should be inserted.
E. Suggest areas that are now dramatized which should be exposition.

III. Character
A. What does the protagonist want? What stands in the way?
B. Does the protagonist struggle with an internal problem? What is it?
C. What is at stake for the protagonist if he/she should "lose"?
E. Did you find out enough about the character that you cared about her/his fate, or was the character merely a name or a characterless cardboard cut out?
D. What does the protagonist learn, or change, or how does he/she grow from what happens in the story? In other words, what is the character's epiphany?

IV. Style
A. Are there multiple appeals to the senses? Do you feel like you experienced the story, or did you feel like you merely found out what happened?
B. Is language used in an original, evocative way (i.e. poetic)?
C. Does dialogue sound realistic? (contractions, no telling of info that everyone in the story already knows, incomplete sentences or colloquialisms where appropriate)
D. Does the dialogue "move" the story? (has "chatty" conversation that is not pertinent to the conflict been eliminated?)
E. Do you care about what happens because the story makes you care?
F. Can you tell where you are in each scene, when you are, and the time and space relation between scenes?
G. Are there enough specifics that this seems like a story that happened to "real" people?

V. Aesthetics
A. Does the story work?
B. Does the story move you emotionally in some way? Does it make you laugh, weep, feel nervousness or tension, or does it make you think?
C. If the story was not written by a class member, would you still find the reading of it worth your time? Would you recommend it to someone else?
D. What does the story mean? Does it seem to have a valid point? Does it make its point convincingly? Does it seem to be permeated with purpose and direction?

VI. Local areas
A. Are words spelled correctly?
B. Are punctuation marks (periods, commas, dashes, hyphens, semi-colons, etc.) used correctly.
C. Are sentences understandable?
D. Is dialogue correctly enclosed in quotation marks?
E. Does a new paragraph begin when there is a change of speaker?

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