Outcome 4 (Peer Review) – Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process.

Peer review may be the biggest difference between high school and college, it’s changed dramatically. I’ve learned exactly how to peer review, and exactly how effective it is to revise. If everyone leaves meaningful feedback on their peer’s papers, then everyone will receive meaningful feedback as well. Through my experiences this semester we’ve done three different peer reviews, which have all been extremely beneficial to me. Not only are we receiving our peer’s feedback, but we’d also get comments from Professor Brod. Having different eyes and perspectives on your piece allows your writing to be seen in many different ways which is valuable. 

Another key point with peer review that we’ve focused on is to offer perspective but to not change their point of view. We learned you shouldn’t change what the writer is saying, you should just offer opinions on how they can improve what they’re already saying. Instead of rewriting a paragraph, you may say, “I think this would be a good spot to bring in an additional source.” And then you may name a good source to bring in. 

I’d like to provide examples of both my own review of my peer’s paper, as well as feedback I’ve received from my classmates. 

Pay attention to how the feedback I received is actionable, and something I can put directly into my essay to improve it. 

This was from Essay #3:

Not only did she give me useful advice that I can work with, but she also began with what she liked. Not necessarily for me, but sometimes when you lead with something you like, the person may be more apt to listen to what advice they may have for your writing. In this case, Audrey inspired me to continue my paragraph and go into detail about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and how we’ve always had to depend on one another.

I now want to look at how my comments have changed from the beginning of the semester to now. I believe every peer review I’ve taken more time to deeply read to give the author the suggestions they deserve.

On the first peer review, I don’t have any physical comments that I’ve kept, but I would normally say something about the clarity of the piece. I’d either say it’s easy to understand, or I’d mention parts that are slightly confusing. I could tell as the semester went on, I began to not just say that, but explain how to make it better.

For example, on Audrey’s rough draft for Essay #3, I left this comment.

This was towards the end of one of her paragraphs, and I felt myself getting a little lost while reading. She was making great points, but instead of just telling her I was getting lost, I gave some advice on how to make this point in her piece clear. I suggested relating back to her thesis just to remind her readers what exactly she’s arguing.

The peer reviews I received were always beneficial, which made me want to put in extra effort to make sure my partner was receiving beneficial suggestions too. I think it’s important to not lose sight of mentioning the things they do well in the piece too, so often people focus on what’s wrong, but I definitely continued leaving compliments on the piece because that always feels good.

I do think my peer reviews have grown throughout the semester into me leaving more meaningful comments for my classmates, critiquing their work with a focus on global revision, and then, later on, looking at the sentence-level structure and local revision.