Learning Outcome 4

Peer Reviewing is a skill that I have learned to expand during this course. In high school, I was afraid of peer reviewing because I never have the trust in my peers to give me truthful feedback. Although, during this course, we would often peer review in class. Using the peer reviewing method that we used in class made me able to trust my peer’s opinion more. In class we would get into peer-reviewing groups, in these groups, we would have someone other than the author of the essay read the writing out loud. Having someone other than the author read the paper out loud allowed the author to hear the writing coming from another point of view and see how someone else reads the work. Next, we would all focus on the one essay and peer review it together, after leaving comments the peers would tell the author why they left the comment. Having the peer explain their comment to me out loud allowed me to gain more trust in their opinion on what I should change in my paper. Throughout this course, we peer-reviewed quit a few times. Although, there is a specific peer review that I feel demonstrates my peer reviewing skills the most. The peer review I am showcasing in on our writing prompt 3. 

Here is some of my peer review work:

Kamryn- I loved how you said “my narrative makes me unique from 7 billion other people in the world, ” I thought it was such an obvious statement but yet, I didn’t even think about it. I felt like it really made me look at my own narrative and see how my story is unique from others. I feel like the way you added quotes in between each paragraph break was a very creative idea to add a spacial factor to your multimodal aspect. Although, I found it to kind of exclude the quotes from your claims and not involve them into the conversation. Something I thought that you included that I found to be very helpful to the reader was adding the time frame of the idea you want the audience to listen to. Lastly, I think it would be a good idea for you to restate your claims into your conclusion paragraph to remind the reader of all the points you make within your paper. Also, it might be a good idea to add in a sentence or two to state what the lesson of this paper was. Such as what was the point of the audience even reading your paper? Overall I really enjoyed your paper, we shared a lot of the same opinions! I love how you consider your life to be divided into a chapter because I do as well! Nice work!

 

Something that I have learned that has stuck with me throughout this entire course is that, when you are writing, there has to be a point. There has to be a reason that the audience is reading this paper. What are they going to gain from reading your work. I tried to keep this piece of advice with me every peer review that I did. I found that focusing on this piece of advice was important for the overall global effect on my peer’s papers.

 

As you can see on the second page of my comments, I left a comment addressing the position of a quote. As you can see, the peer placed her quote in the middle of the page break. I told my peer that I thought this was a very clever idea to fulfill the multimodal aspect of our paper, as I found it was a great use of the spacial aspect, although I felt that not including the quote into the next lost my peers connection with her claim and her resources ideas. I felt by doing this her claims were not supported. I felt that this was a global edit that should be considered for my peers paper.

 

While peer reviewing I feel that it is important for me to pull out all of the claims to make sure I am following along with my peer but also to make sure my peer is stating their claims clearly. You can see throughout these reviews I have several comments that entail “claim.”

 

As you can see on the last page of my reviews I addressed that my peer should include the lesson of this paper into her restated thesis. I explained to my peer that I have learned that it is important to have a reason/a lesson behind your writing to give the audience a reason for reading your work and also giving your audience a piece of knowledge to walk away from your work with.

 

Another aspect that I always try to add into peer reviews is positive encouragement, I feel that sometimes in writing we can all become down on ourselves and lost in our ideas. I find that when we read things over and over again we sometimes loose the meaning of what we are trying to say, in our brains that statement has no meaning to us anymore because we have read it so many times. I feel that when you give postive encouragement to your peer on their essay, it helps them see that other people do understand what they are talking about and what they are stating makes sence. I feel that this postive encouragement is very uplifting to my peers and helps them continue on their creative writing path.

 

Before english 110, in highschool I would always peer review while only focusing on local edits. I would leave little comments throughout the essay crossing out commons where I felt that there shouldn’t be a common or fixing a spelling error. Although, during our first peer review, I remember our professor put us up for a challenge. I remember our professor saying “do not let yourself become distracted with little grammer mistakes, take a look at the bigger picture instead.” I feel that this course has helped me look at the bigger picture while peer reviewing and because of this course I am able to read an essay and help my peer make global edits.