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. (483 words)

Peer review was an extremely different experience in this class compared to my high school peer review. In high school, I dreaded peer review as usually I’d hand my paper to one of my classmates and get it back with little to no suggestions for improvement. It felt like a waste of time when I put in effort to honestly critique a peer’s piece only to get one back that was devoid of any substance. This class however, gave me a much more positive peer review experience. We actually spent time going over what we were supposed to comment on and what was the appropriate comment to make. My peers always left me with something of use after I finished the peer review session, and rather than feeling like my time was wasted, I felt like I actually could improve and fix issues that were not so glaring to me.

I made and received the highest quality peer review suggestions on the third essay. My peer was critical, but in a way that forced me to reconsider my ideas’ positioning in the piece and I made sure to approach their work in a similar way. Below are some sample peer review comments that I believe focused on large, big picture edits my peer could make on their essay:

Image 1 shows me suggesting to my peer that they should address their thesis more throughout their piece, a global revision as it requires a top down view to integrate big picture ideas throughout. Image 2 gives some structural recommendations, offering advice on where ideas could be restated for a conclusion and suggesting some reformatting. In image 3, I also provide some more suggestions on reordering ideas for a conclusion. Image 4 is a recommendation for further detail, which is more sentence level, but still may alter the paragraphs on a global level. Finally, Image 5 shows my end comment on my peer’s essay, where I indicate the biggest issues for revision and how I interpreted their points.

Here are some comments left by my peer on my Essay #3 that I found to be particularly insightful:

Images 1 and 2 show how my peer recommended fixing some of my concerns in my third essay. They provide some good insight, telling me how they interpreted the issues I was seeing while giving suggestions for fixing these issues. Image 3 is an example of a more sentence level issue that I applied to the majority of the paper; I saw the issue in this sentence and was then able to take that advice and apply it to other spots in my writing. In image 4, my peer reminds me that it is important to restate my voice, a criticism that I took and also applied throughout. It’s thanks to this comment that this became one of the issues I wanted to address in my final draft.