Learning Outcome #4: Peer Review
In this English class, we had three major papers that we worked on, and before we turned in each one we did a peer review. All of us were assigned a partner and we would trade papers and then we read over the papers and leave comments the fill out a reflective worksheet. Normally this process would be done in person but because of the pandemic, we had to improvise and learn how to do the process online. We would email each other our papers and then after leaving comments and finishing the worksheet we zoomed each other to talk about what went well in the paper and what needed to be improved.
I had done many peer edits assignments in high school, but it was never very useful to me before this class. In this class we really dug deep into the papers we were editing and had to give very meaningful feedback that I felt significantly helped my paper by catching many of the gaps that I originally overlooked when writing the paper. It was a very helpful process and it was designed in a way that even with the pandemic we were still able to have meaningful conversations about our papers and how they can be improved.
The peer review that I’m showing on my page is the peer review for the second essay about the use of technology in society. For this essay, it was already very strong and well developed but I left a few comments about adding more of an introduction to her quote, that way it felt more natural in the paragraph rather than just being dropped in. This would help support the thesis more and make the paper feel more organized. I also pointed out some choppy sentences that I thought the author should go back and revisit. After we talked about and I explained in more detail where I thought a sentence or two was needed or reworded she understood and was able to reword the paragraph to make it a lot stronger and support her thesis more.
Overall this peer review process is super helpful and can help to catch any little or big mistakes a paper has before it’s turned in. I definitely learned a lot about how to leave helpful comments and really dig deep when doing peer reviews rather than just surface-level comments.
