Category: Peer Review

My partner was Jenna, and we decided to use the peer review guidelines from the Social Media project because they aligned pretty well with what we wanted feedback on. We then left additional comments along with those with any extra ideas or thoughts we had upon reading the other person’s paper. I thought the review was helpful because I was able to receive a lot of comments about ways to fix my paper, such as changing evidence and clarifying my thesis statement. One area where I wish I had received a little more feedback is if my claims and ideas were concise enough. Reading through my paper, I realized my ideas are a bit scattered, but I was able to get help with this in my conference.

I thought that the peer-reviewing specific to MLA formatting was helpful because a second set of eyes to look over it made me more confident that I had done it correctly. I felt we were both able to give and receive feedback, and I made little changes based on this feedback. I had the same partner as the first peer-review which I think helped because she had already read through my essay once. I also looked over my paper and focused on wording issues. When I did this, I found unnecessary words I could take out as well as words that I needed to change.

One thing I liked about the way we reflected on these pieces was that there was a structure on how to review them. Before, when I was told to peer review a paper, I would automatically go to grammar and punctuation mistakes. However, when given a description of specific things I needed to comment on I feel like I was able to give (and receive) more structured and actionable feedback. I felt like I was easily able to give feedback on things that worked well and pieces that could be improved. As for the self-reflection of our papers, I liked making and having a key to show the different pieces of my writing. I personally find color-coding very helpful because it creates a visual aspect to the writing. Also, in this case, I think the color coding will be very helpful when looking back at our rough drafts and comparing them to the final drafts. It will show clearly what has been changed and improved upon. However, one thing that may not be completely helpful is that what we wrote were rough drafts. Because of this, there may be specific details and quotes we were planning on adding in later so color-coding this early may not have shown what we had planned for the paper content-wise.

Most of the comments I left were suggestions on grammar and punctuation fixes. I hesitated and didn’t leave some comments that I thought about because I wasn’t sure if they would be super helpful. These mostly included switching words around to make something smoother to read. Looking back, I probably should have just left the comments as something for the reader to think about whether they would have wanted to change it in the end or not. I also tried to leave a comment about something in their piece that I thought was really good. I believe these suggestions are helpful because it allows the writer to see something that they are good at. Also, there may be something from their perspective they weren’t sure was completely necessary, but from the reader’s perspective it could be important information.

Looking back on the comments I received, I thought the most helpful ones were about rewording something to either make it clearer or more concise. One comment in particular was about how I was introducing a quote. I knew when I wrote it that it sounded a bit awkward but I wasn’t quite sure how to fix it so I just left it. However, one of my peer reviewers gave me a suggestion to fix that and it was actually very helpful. These comments will shape my reviewing process because I am going to look through my paper and see if there are any other spots where I could be clearer or more concise that they might not have commented on. I also got a comment about a word I accidentally put in that I didn’t notice which was helpful and an easy fix.