The amount of peer review that we did throughout this semester made me much better at it, and a better writer. By the third project, I was much more concise with the comments that I made, and I had a better idea going in about what I was looking for. In class, we were always told to look at the bigger picture and made bigger comments for our peers. We should not focus on grammar mistakes, especially if there are multiple: that would make for too many comments, all short and about the same thing. Instead, the comments we made were more focused on structure, reader comprehension, and flow. I love correcting grammar, it is satisfying, but I did my best to ignore it and trust that my classmate would fix it before they turned it in. I instead made a lot of comments about the bigger parts of the paragraphs. I focused on the thesis often and if I saw it represented throughout the whole essay. I also looked at the body paragraphs because we worked a lot on Barclay’s paragraphs this semester to make our structure better. A specific comment I made here on Beckett’s essay was at the top of his second page. I commented “expand if you’re going to mention this, don’t leave it hanging at the end of a paragraph.” When we met in person, I gave him a little more depth about my comment. He had added in at the end of his body paragraph a big idea about “this generation, politics, and violence within the country.” I thought it was a really interesting take and I wanted to hear more. However, there was nothing more. I told him that if he was going to include it, which I hope he did, make it a bigger part of the essay. He can’t just drop it in as the second-to-last sentence of this paragraph, because it left me, and probably other readers, wondering more. If he had led into it in his next paragraph that would have been great, but he didn’t at the time that I read it and that left me wondering about that big idea later on, rather than focusing on everything else he said through the rest of his essay. Overall on this essay, I left a few comments regarding paragraph and sentence structure as well. I do sometimes feels bad if I’m criticizing a lot, but I know that is the reason that we are doing peer review. In the future, I can worry less about the amount of criticism, as long as it is helpful to my classmate.
