Blog Post #2

Peer review was always a required step in our writing process in high school. Getting your draft reviewed by a peer counted towards your grade, so as long as a classmate wrote a few comments in red and signed off on it, you were safe. I think my school’s issue with peer review was mostly that no one ever taught us how to peer review. We were given a rubric by which to grade papers by and never really told to have a conversation with the author of the text.

I remember receiving vague feedback from my classmates and never knowing what to do with it. I hated getting my papers looked over, because I wasn’t advised on how to move forward with my writing. On the other hand, I liked giving peer reviews, because looking over someone else’s work helped me to fix some mistakes on my own. I would try to give verbal feedback and explain the comments I had made, but no one really seemed to care about making their work better. They just wanted the grade.

I think the most challenging part of peer review for me will be to take the notes and advice my peers give me and apply it in the way they intended. I’m afraid using their comments and messing up my work because I didn’t understand the point that they were trying to make.

I believe that I am really good at noticing little details that don’t flow in another person’s work. I can be critical where it counts, and I don’t think I have ever told someone that I “liked” their work during a peer review, because I don’t really think my opinion matters in that aspect. Peer reviews exist to make a piece of writing more coherent and readable, and how “likable” it is is simply a second factor.

Song of the Day

i get by with a little help from my friends