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.