My first experience with an in-class peer review has been
this Writing 150 course. However, in the past I have found that having a peer,
parent, or teacher proofread my writing outside of class has been very beneficial.
It is an effective way of having a potential audience member examine my thesis
and logic for quality. It is has also been beneficial for me because I often
make grammar errors or just leave out words unintentionally, and often times I
do not catch these mistakes because my mind tends to automatically fill them in
or correct them while I am reading. Thanks to having others review my writing,
these errors are often caught before I begin my final draft. I have found that
both of these benefits have held true with our in-class peer reviews. With my
opinion editorial, I got very helpful feedback not just from my peers but from
the instructor that helped me make a more effective argument and appeal better
to my audience. With the rhetorical analysis, I received feedback that helped
me examine my word choice and thesis and make appropriate corrections that
improved my essay. With both of these papers, I was made aware of grammar and
phrasing errors that I had yet to recognize. So with this being said, I believe
that peer review is very beneficial. It helps the writer receive input and
feedback from a microcosm audience, and thus it helps the writer tailor his or
her argument to be most effective to the target. The only reservation that I
have with peer review is that it requires not just work from the writer, but it
also requires an attentive reviewer. While I have been lucky enough to get good
feedback in our WRTG 150 course, there have been times in high school that I
either received unhelpful, non-specific feedback or insincere feedback, such as
one case where a reviewer likely did not even read my essay, just telling me
that it was “good.” Overall, I would recommend continuance of our current peer
review process in this course because I have seen great benefits from it.
I agree with you that peer review is very helpful. So many of my errors are caught such as sentence structure and grammar issues. I also think that the peer review helps us become better editors as well.
ReplyDeleteI have had very similar experiences! I think we all overlook simple mistakes in our writing, because we have yet to fine-tune the editing process, and we remember our original intentions from when we wrote the work for the first time.
ReplyDeleteI agree I think that peer review has been helpful in pointing out not so obvious to me errors because like you said Our minds do tend to fill things in automatically for us on our own writing.
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