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.

In high school I taught how to peer review, well kind of. It basically consisted of me going through a checklist and making sure they have all the components included from the prompt. It also consisted of some very minor local revisions, so you might be able to tell that my background of true peer review was very limited before coming to college. I remember the first peer review session we had in class, beforehand I was excited because in the past if we had time to peer review I would review someone’s work for 20 minutes and then have the rest of the class to do whatever I want. This is not at all how it went for my first college level peer review. I spent probably an hour going over a classmate’s essay. I definitely could have taken longer, but since classes aren’t that long I had to cut back on some of the revisions. As time went on, I got very comfortable with peer review and it actually started to be something I looked forward to because it really helped me with the papers prompt by looking at others’ work and also getting feedback on my own work.

Professor Brod emphasized on the importance of focusing on the bigger picture and trying to help other classmates build off whatever idea they are talking about in their paper (global revision). He also emphasized that we should not be so focused on sentence level errors in our classmates’ work because that is something that they can fix on their own (local revision). In the image below you can see how I encourage one of my classmates to extend on an idea that they touched on in their essay. (see image below)

You can see that instead of just saying nice naysayers (something I would do in high school) I put some thought into how they could make it even better. I think I did an overall good job giving a critique without making it seem like there was something wrong with what they wrote.

In my third essay, I was having trouble with a sentence and the way I was writing it. I was making it seem like I meant one thing when in reality I meant the complete opposite. I didn’t realize this mistake until my peer review partner commented on it. (see image below)

After they had commented on this I realized how big of a mistake this was and if I didn;t fix it, it contradicted everything else I was saying in my paper. I went back to try and brainstorm a different way of saying it, and I still couldn’t think of any solutions. So during my mandatory meeting without writing, I brought up my and this is really where I fixed the sentence to my liking. (see image below)

It still might not be the best, but I think through two different peer review conversations I think the sentence had much needed improvement.