“Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process.”
As the semester progressed, I feel like my peer review feedback became more global and less localized. Both are valuable, but it is more valuable in these early stages to focus on larger issues that don’t just have to do with small sentence errors. Early in the year, I pointed out more of the smaller issues than the larger ones. While I did have some comments addressing the overall structure of the essays, I often had comments talking about how specific sentences were a confusing and how they were missing small details. This is valuable feedback, but since it was one of the first drafts, they may have found these areas themselves later on in the revising and editing process, where the editing would be more focused on these smaller errors. In the third project peer review, I tried to really stick to comments about overall structure, to make sure the writer had a solid base to start tweaking those smaller sentence-level issues. There isn’t really much of a point to editing the words in a sentence if the thesis itself hasn’t been figured out.
Here, I really tried to make sure the individual parts of the introduction were as clear as possible, because the introduction is one of the most important parts of the essay. If it doesn’t make sense, then neither will the rest of the essay. I think my most valuable piece of feedback here was to tweak the thesis so that it included the writer’s thoughts. If it didn’t, then reading the rest of the writer’s thoughts later on could get confusing.
Here, I mention other essential parts of the structure of the essay, like bringing the quotes together and analyzing them. Without this, the essay would be more of a restatement and less a conversation, so adding analysis is a very essential piece. I also mention the introduction again and talk about how that second paragraph is very good and can be incorporated into the rest of the essay to make it all fit together, and also bring up some other areas I previously commented on where this work could be useful. Overall, I think this is my best peer review because I focused on larger issues and gave, in my opinion, the most in-depth suggestions I have all semester.
