Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on cape cod national seashore. The paper has headings and subheadings for each aspect they talked about. Even a person new to the process of mediation will be able to understand this article. The simplicity of the vocabularies used also helped in this regard. The only problem I see in the article is how lengthy it is. Certainly, the descriptions and organization in the writing helped in understanding it. However, because the whole article, excluding the annexes & bibliography, is 15 pages long, a reader may lose interest in the middle of, maybe, A Historical Perspective. Personally, I don’t think this part is even helpful in explaining the value of conflict assessment to stakeholders.

Mediator Insight: Disputants’ Perceptions of Third Parties’ Knowledge and Its Effect on Mediated Negotiation

This article also presents the results of the research. However, unlike the first one which centered on the process of negotiation, this paper focuses on the parties involved in the conflict. Attention is focused on how the level of information mediator have on the issue affects the disputants’ perceptions & behaviors. Instead of an actual situation, this research is based on experiments with variations on the mediator’s recommendations and the information given to disputants representing how much mediators knew about the disputants’ needs and interests. The introduction explains a) the mediation process, b) the relation between the mediator’s credibility & their level of insight on the dispute, and c) the hypotheses to be tested. It goes on to describe the different elements of the experiment & the results. The paper also gives the writer’s recommendations on similar future researches. For the discussion and concluding part, the article explains why peer mediation, such as someone in the company who has much insight on the dispute, is usually more favorable than a formal 3rd party mediator with limited insight. It also, however, presents the limitations of peer mediation & the circumstances of the study. What’s not good about this article is how too informative it was. There were just too many paragraphs, formulas within the paragraphs & vocabulary to absorb. Again, I am not positive if the reader will appreciate the article’s verbosity. As for its strength, for me, it is the use of visuals (e.g. Figure 1). Although it adds to the length of the article, the figures render a sense of conciseness to the piece. With an article this wordy, the diagrams & tables were a big help to me in following the explanations.