I believe I have improved in my peer reviews throughout this semester. Learning outcome #4 states, “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 other words, students should be able to recognize important changes that could be made within their own and others’ writing. When critiquing one’s own or another’s first draft, they should be able to recommend organizational improvements that could be made or suggestions about information and/or evidence that could be removed or added. When critiquing later drafts, they should be able to recognize word choices that could be changed or sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation errors. At the beginning of this course, I was more hesitant to make comments. I didn’t want to say something wrong and I wasn’t as confident in trying to make suggestions. I tended to only make local revision suggestions and even with these, I wasn’t as confident. The first three pictures above are examples of comments I left on a peer’s paper at the beginning of the semester. I focused on specific words and for most comments, I began with “maybe” because I didn’t feel as confident critiquing others’ work.
However, as we continued, I was able to build my confidence and improve. I began to make suggestions on global revision changes and I worked to provide constructive criticism by suggesting ways to fix the problem I was noting. For example, in the essay shown in the fourth picture above, the author had not yet included a counterargument. So, for my comment about their counterargument, instead of just telling them they should include one I tried to give advice about a source where they could find points towards the other side. I also attempted to put a good balance of criticisms as well as explaining what they did well. This was shown in my “integration of sources” comment. In this comment, I began by explaining that the sources and evidence used throughout his piece were effective in supporting his main claim and his ideas. However, throughout his piece, it seemed that he only used quoting to share this evidence that he found. Because of this, I suggested to paraphrase or summarize some of the information he included from his sources. Finally, I ended the comment by complimenting his correctly formatted in-text citation. One thing I need to continue to work on for peer reviews is to add comments of my own. For most of the peer reviews, I stuck with the required comments we needed to give each other. While these covered the majority of the suggestions to be made, if I had dug deeper I could have made more comments based on other suggestions I had. This way I would have given myself more freedom to explain what I liked about each piece and what I thought could be changed.
