Learning Outcome #4
Learning Outcome #4
Throughout my peer review process in class, I had the chance to peer review a few of my classmate’s work more than once. The example that I feel demonstrates my progress in peer review the most is my review of both Ashley Nault’s first essay and her third essay. In Ashley’s first essay, I provided comments about where she could add important details to her paper so her work would make a bigger impact on the reader. In one specific example, I suggested she begin her paragraph by talking about the product Soylent and Rob Rhinehart, since they were the focus of her essay. Before I gave her this suggestion, she didn’t mention Soylent until she reached her thesis. In this first essay I gave a lot of local suggestions, but not as many global ones. I think I gave more local suggestions at the beginning of this semester because those are the only suggestions I was required to make in high school. As I peer reviewed more papers, I made sure to include more global examples, so my peers could improve their papers and writing skills as a whole.
Since I got to peer review Ashley’s last paper as well, I know I was able to give her more global comments. For example, when she discussed the 1918 flu pandemic in her third essay, I suggested she compare the differences and similarities of COVID-19 and the 1918 flu pandemic. My idea behind this suggestion was these comparisons would bring more of her own analysis into the essay and would also give her the opportunity to elaborate on the 1918 flu pandemic. I also gave more global suggestions in my feedback letter on Ashley’s third essay than her first. For example, in this last essay I suggested she could expand her thesis to include civic virtue, since it was mentioned multiple times in her paper. As the semester went on, I developed a deeper understanding of what global concerns were, so I improved on identifying them in my peer’s essays.
Although my global suggestions in peer review improved over the semester, I can still continue to work on giving even more in-depth feedback. Some of my suggestions on Ashley’s peer review page were to reword a sentence, use a different tense, and correct spelling errors. These comments are important to the mechanics of her paper, but she would probably have found these errors by editing the essay herself. I think being able to discuss peer review in class like we did before the pandemic was more helpful to me than I’d realized because I was able to ask questions. By receiving the answers to questions I had about my peer’s papers I was able to give even better in class suggestions about what they could do with their paper to improve its quality even more.
