Peer Reviewing...

Peer review this week has been going great to me. I can admit I was extremely nervous at first, not only about my peers reading my papers but knowing that I was going to have to be the judge of someone else’s memoir. Then I thought about it, I’m not there to judge anyone’s paper but to help them build a stronger paper. I remembered the article we read on Really Responding to Other Student’s writing. Once we got into our groups in class, my group decided that it would be best if we just read through the first paper together and then go over any comments we had to say, which was not what we were assigned to do. So we started over having to read our own paper out loud to everyone else and that made a massive difference. Reading out loud made me realize some of my mistakes in my memoir, listen to how my paper sounded to others and allowed them to hear how my paper was meant to sound. That was something I wish I would have thought to do many times in high school.

After reading the papers I was given all kinds of comments and feedback from my group members. The comments they gave me were more than what I expected, more than the usual grammar errors. They told me where I need to elaborate on things because to me I already know the people in my paper or the point I’m trying to get across in some sentences but that wasn’t coming across in my memoir. The homework that night, adding our comments on Microsoft word, gave me a chance to really say what I didn’t get to say in class and what I didn’t know how to say. I added anything I could think of in my comments that wasn’t clear, what I would like to know more on and where they were trying convey. When I was finished with my margin comments, I took the advice from the assigned reading and added a final mini paragraph at the end to summarize up my thoughts and add one final question.

The hardest struggle for me this far is coming up with the point in my own paper. I didn’t want a point that just summed up my memoir but a point that I could state and everyone of my examples lead back to that specific point. I’ve got somewhat of an idea and think I’m on the right track but I’m sure after these peer reviews I’ll have a pretty concise point in the end.