Evaluating their peers’ compositions can stimulate students’ sensitivity towards errors in their own compositions and improve their own writing skills. The authors of this book invited high school students from representative schools in Shanghai and Hong Kong to engage in composition writing and to observe the effects of evaluation by and on their peers. Twenty-five selected students of both cities were asked to write commonly assigned compositions, including narratives, descriptions, comments, expository prose and lyrics. The compositions were mailed to the students and teachers in the partner city for evaluation and correction then returned to their authors for final refinement.  Afterwards, the researchers gathered the scripts together and analyzed all the work.

The book contains comprehensive analyses of 50 compositions from original version to final work, including students’ and teachers’ evaluation of the work of peers in the opposite city, the students’ own post-writing reflection and the editors’ comments on all the work.

Shanghai and Hong Kong are two prosperous cities in China and each is noted for its own specialties in Chinese language education. The book shows the potential fruits of collaboration and exchange between educationists in the two cities and is an important reference for teachers and students in secondary and primary schools in China.