I believe I efficiently completed learning outcome 4. I gave my peers useful and well thought out feedback for peer review, which included local and global concerns. We learned a lot of aspects on how to produce a good essay in class and I applied this when editing their work as well as completing my own. Below there is a PDF attached of a paper I peer reviewed. I made a variety of comments, and included a feedback letter at the end. At the beginning I commented, “Is this your thesis? If so, try to be more specific on what exactly it is that you learned.” This is a really significant comment because the thesis is a huge part of any paper, and it needs to really engulf the main idea of the essay. I wasn’t making comments like this in previous peer reviews but as time went on I got a deeper understanding of what a thesis needed to accomplish. In this specific case, I believed the thesis wasn’t including all the information it needed to be efficient and it didn’t talk about what she learned, which was the whole purpose of the paper. As I continued my peer editing, I made some local comments, such as changing topic sentences to really hook the reader, or mentioning that “say” and “said” aren’t great ways to integrate a quotation. Since the beginning of the semester, when I thought peer review was about fixing grammar and sentence structure, I felt I really developed as a student. I really focused on global concerns when reading through others papers, which I believe is a lot more useful and it also reminds you of what needs to be included in your own paper. Another global concern I commented on was the analyzing of quotations. A comment I made was, “Similar to the last paragraph, it almost feels like you’re just summarizing what the quote says. Dig deeper and say how this impacts you and what you learned from this.” I think that it is difficult to analyze quotations, so I try to point out where more is needed to really back up the point you’re making. Summarizing isn’t including your own voice, which is the whole point, to keep these papers conversational. I can always improve but I believe I developed a lot while peer reviewing others’ work this semester and learned a lot while doing so.
