Throughout this semester, I have grown as peer reviewer. When I came into this class, all of my previous peer review sessions never offered much help to me when finalizing my draft. But now I have a new appreciation for peer reviewing rough drafts because we are all at a point where we can give honest feedback to help the other person. In the first essays I peer reviewed, I mainly focused on local concerns throughout the paper, editing grammatical errors, fixing spelling or punctuation. For example, on one of the essays, I found a lot of grammatical errors and confusing sentence. I would use a light blue color to indicate where I typed and tried to fix the essay. Another example from the first peer editing, was in one of the essays I really only commented on sentence structure and offered advice to fix confusing sentences. Specifically, this person wrote “We can’t let the hustle and bustle of the world make us hate something that’s important has withstood the test of time.” I commented on second half of the sentence saying, “The way this sentence is worded is a little confusing. Try rewording it, ‘something important that had withstood the test of time’ maybe?”. However, as the semester progressed I did less and less of this type of editing and focused more on the global issues. I still commented on confusing sentence and offered grammatical help but I focused more on the overall sound and flow of the essay as a whole. During the second peer review, I looked at the feedback I received from the previous peer edits and tried to incorporate some of their comments into my own. For example, on my essay, my peers commented telling me to make sure I connect each paragraph back to the thesis. I used this advice in the second peer review session and focused my attention on commenting on making sure the thesis is seen and supported throughout the whole essay. Specifically, I commented, “Connect this paragraph back to the thesis about the wizard and prophets to make your essay more cohesive.” In class we had a discussion about adding our own thoughts and ideas throughout the essay. I incorporated this talk into my peer reviews because I commented things such as, “I am assuming this is your thesis. Try to put your own believes in it to make the reader know that it is your thoughts and not someone else’s.” By my third peer review, I was almost solely commenting on global concerns, but I did still comment on grammatical errors and sentence structure. For example, in one essay I stated, “You can expand on this and give examples of how this virus is impacting the country. You mentioned a few in the introduction, but maybe expand on those ideas here and how they have impacted you.” I believe that my progression of editing peer’s work has improved drastically from day one to now. I have moved away from focusing on local areas of concern to looking at the essay as a whole and focusing on areas that could be expanded on or tweaking the thesis to match the rest of the essay. I still comment of these local areas of concern because they are still important and necessary to make the essay sound better.
