Peer Review Process

By doing peer reviews it helps the reviewer to become a better writer as well as the person whose paper is being reviewed. This process is more than just correcting basic mistakes such as grammar or spelling like we did in high school, it is reading through the paper and giving ideas based on how the well or bad the person did in writing there paper. While doing these peer reviews I have noticed that I focus more on clarity, context and detail than just the grammar aspects. As I read my peers papers, I still seem to notice the smaller errors but not as much as I did before I knew how to actually peer review. It is very obvious that throughout my peer review process I seem to make comments on the same types of things even in different kinds of papers. When reviewing the Literacy Inquiry papers, I found it hard to focus on the broader aspects of the paper and I think this is because it was my first time trying to evaluate whether there was too much detail or too little detail but I didn’t want to be superfluous in my constructive criticism. In both papers, the Literacy Inquiry and the Researched Based Argumentative, I found myself giving compliments and criticism where needed but also tried to give suggestions for ways I thought they could better improve the paper. As a reader, I felt I should try and give them my point of view on what was confusing to me and what I thought they did well. While reading the Literacy Inquiry I found myself looking more at how well they were telling the story and how they reflected on their experiences. In the Research paper, I found myself looking more at the facts, the supportive details and the counter argument than how well it was written. This process has definitely helped me to develop a better understanding of writing my own papers and also helping to develop my peer’s papers into better works of writing. 

The Blogging Life

When I attended my first college English class, I was told we were going to be blogging and commenting on other people’s blogs. My first thought was this kind of sounds like Facebook or twitter but it can’t be like that because this is English class. As I designed my blog site, I found it interesting that we were going to be writing about topics that were happening in our everyday lives. When I wrote my first blog, I found myself getting into what I was writing. Our word amount was 250-300 words and I was so interested in writing my blog that when I was finished I wrote almost 800 words. I have really enjoyed this writing process and I feel like it helps me to express what I am thinking and feeling at that time. I also feel like blogging has helped me to become a better writer by reading other peoples writings and comparing them to mine.However, I have to be aware of my audience when I am blogging because it is an academic point of view and you actually have to have a point and not just ramble on about something. I used to hate when teachers would tell us to write 5 paragraph essays about something that I had no clue about. I believe blogging gives me the freedom to write what I want and to choose the topics that I write about as well as read some other very interesting writing from my peers about stuff that I can relate to. I enjoy putting my own opinion out there and seeing what other people think about it. This is the best thing about blogging to me because I can get the situation off of my chest without any judgments from my peers. I have kind of struggled with coming up with topics that I was going to write about to begin with but I would just sit my computer down until something popped into my head.

Peer Review

Over the past few weeks in class, we have been discussing and reading about peer reviewing our peer's writing. In the readings, I learned not to be so harsh when leaving comments but to act like it is your own paper that you are editing. Give good feedback and help them to make their paper a lot easier to understand as a reader. When our teacher first told us we were going to have to peer edit papers, my first thought was how I am going to edit someone else's paper when I can't even edit my own. The first thing I think of when editing papers is correcting grammar and spelling mistakes so that should be easy. Well I thought wrong, there was much more to reviewing a paper than just spelling and grammar. According to the readings we have done and the process through which we have already incorporated with our literacy narratives, I have learned that after we read our peer’s papers we are supposed to comment on what we thought they did well, what we would change, and what confused us. This process has been absolutely wonderful in helping me to realize what my strengths were and what my weaknesses were.  However, I really don’t like reading so it made the process of reviewing my other classmate’s papers a lot harder than I had expected. It helped me to read the paper out loud so that I could hear myself speaking and actually comprehend their mistakes. I found it odd that reading these papers was actually pretty interesting and made me want to help my classmates with their paper because they did such a good job of commenting on mine and helping me through the process. 

Are you one of these people?

When I was walking back from class today, I happened to hear out of the corner of my ear, these two girls in front of me were carrying on a conversation about another girl that was walking the opposite direction. As I heard them say "ew that girl is hideous, why is she with that hot guy"? It made me start to think about how judgmental people are in the world today. We all like to think that we judge people fairly but obviously this is not true because judging people based on their external factors is not fair, when they usually can't help there appearance. Our first impressions of people usually have a strong impact on the way we judge a person and it is sometimes hard to change our minds when we already have made misconceptions. Whether we like to admit it or not, we judge people every day based on their looks or what they are wearing. You never know what a person is like if you just judge them by the way they look because honestly everybody has been through hard times in their life and if you don't take the time to get to know them then you’re just hurting yourself. The external factors that we most often judge people by are skin color, clothes they wear, weight, age, and gender. Clearly it is hard to change our personal biases that impact our judgment, but this is becoming a big issue in our country. Our minds seem to quickly jump to conclusions about people with very little evidence of who they are. However, these conclusions can keep us from building healthy relationships with loving and intelligent people. I believe that as a human being we can overcome these tendencies by consciously doing so, whereas animals do not have that choice. It is up to us as young adults to change our preconceptions of people and learn to open ourselves up to a broader range of people. It is very interesting for me to walk from class to class every day and hear people’s judgmental point of view because we don't know who they are. 

Surprises!

At the beginning of this week, I was getting ready to attend the UNC Charlotte vs. Temple basketball game when my phone rings. When I looked at it, I was surprised to see that my sister was calling because she usually only calls about something that she needs or wants to borrow from me. I answered the phone and she said "I've been meaning to talk to you about something". She then starts to ramble on asking me all these questions and then she says "Will you be the maid of honor in my wedding this summer?" My heart dropped because I didn't know what it was going to entail and I have never been a big part of a wedding before. I continued to talk to her about what exactly I had to do and she said that out of all of her friends, she would like for me to do her toast and to plan out her bachelorette party. I am not a very good planner nor am I a good public speaker so all that kind of hit me at once and I started rethinking my decision. When I talked to my mom later on that day, I realized how much of an honor it is to be asked to do such a thing in a wedding. I finally told my sister that I would do it and she started crying because she was so excited about it. I cannot believe she is already so grown up and getting married. It's hard to believe that she will be living with her husband in less than a year and we will have to call each other to even see each other instead of just calling each other to borrow something. I have learned to cherish every moment in life because life goes by way to fast and some people don't even get to enjoy it.

Born and Raised

When I actually start think about dialect and accents these days, it makes me wonder if North Carolina actually has a more popular accent over another because it seems that when we talk to each other we all seem to have our own individual accent. I was born and raised in Raleigh and would say that I have a southern accent or as some people refer to as a country bumpkin. I find myself often using words that are not a part of the English language or "slang", especially when I am talking to someone that speaks the same way as I do. I have started to wonder if North Carolinians can still be called “southern” because we have so many different origins of people that moved into our state. I often use double negatives such as “I ain’t got nothing” which is part of the way I learned to speak growing up in a southern state and family. When I first went to another state and I said something like “Can I have a soda”?, they would say they didn’t know what soda was because they call it “pop” in the northern states. I feel like every day when people carry on a conversation they don’t realize the difference in the way they speak even though there is usually a big difference but I have come to realize that we all speak in a way that we all understand but we use different words or phrases. Whenever I am at home for a while around my family and friends that speak the same way I do, my country voice starts to come out more because of my surroundings. I can imagine that it would be hard to move to a different part of the country and to get adjusted to the way that people speak around you because of the dialect and accent of other people. I believe that we often judge people by the way that they talk but in reality no one can help the way they talk because it’s just a part of who you grew up with and where you were born. 

Determining Literacy

After reading about literacy and having a discussion in class, it makes me think about what people do to become literate these days and how people are judged based upon there literacy. When I read “The Elements of Literacy,” it talks about how our social class determines just how much literacy a person should have. People who are of the high class should be a lot more literate than those of the middle and lower classes. However, we all know that someone of a higher class isn’t always smarter or more literate than other classes because if you can read or write should not be based on how much your income is. Do standardized tests really measure our literacy either? If we base how good a person can read or write on a few tests that supposedly measure every aspect of a person’s literacy then we are being bias towards people who are gifted in different ways. I believe that our literacy shouldn’t be based on a few multiple choice tests that are given at the end of the year to see what they crammed in our heads during a semester.  We should take more practical tests that are actually based on real life instances where as the tests we are required to take are based on what they want us to learn even when we won’t ever need to know most of the stuff that is required by the “No Child Left Behind Act.” Everyone has different views of how they think literacy should be measured and tested but it’s common sense that no one should be judged on their literacy based on their social class or the way they are raised in a household.