Peer Review Recap 4

This time peer the peer review process went pretty well. I wrote two drafts of my essay and received helpful criticism for both. I think the quality of the suggestions have improved in general, and many were quite helpful. Personally, I've the comments I gave people were about what they could add as opposed to what they could change with regards to the writing they've already done. I added a few comments, but for the most part people simply had not expanded upon ideas enough.

I feel that the nature of our advice during peer reviews has become much more critical while at the same time has gotten more helpful. At first many people seemed unsure about what they should comment on and felt the need to make changes to other people's writing just to prove that they had done the assignment. After we talked about the peer reviewing process in class halfway through the semester people tended to improve the quality of their comments.

I found that through-out the semester one standard thing was that most of my comments were to encourage people who hadn't written enough to actually write more, or to do the assignment at all. I've tried to include as much constructive criticism as I could, but if people don't write enough to give us something to edit it kind of defeats the point. As I said, this time it went better, but I still felt like I was writing "expand on this" over and over.

In terms of the advice I received, most of it had to do with making statements more clear. This helped me pin-point some paragraphs that I felt weren't quite working or were more confusing than they should have been.