At the beginning of the peer review process around Project 1, I think I was afraid of offending my peers and their writing by actually specifying parts of their work that needed help so I was very generalized and tried to give the bare minimum so I couldn’t offend the writers. After getting to know everyone in class and doing reviews in class out loud, I got more comfortable with reviewing others’ work without feeling like I would offend someone by giving actual reviews. I started focusing on the big picture and what moves the author was trying to make. I looked at the placement of quotes, the wording of sentences, how was the thesis and quotes framed, etc. In one of my reviews, I had told my peer that, “the thesis was a bit confusing as you talk about the benefits of technology briefly, then go onto talk about the negative factors about technology. If you are going to talk about the benefits it needs to be In the text otherwise your thesis can’t give the reader a proper view of your paper. It may have been the word choice or reader error, but it was still confusing so maybe some clarification would be beneficial to your paper.” I think towards the beginning I was also focusing on the small sentence level and word choice concerns, as those are the easiest to find especially when as a reader you can get confused. As I got more confident with peer review I could look at the main ideas of what the writers were trying to say, and then give them ideas on what to say, add, or take away from their texts. Some peers may not have had enough “I say” so I would write a little note for them. One idea I gave a peer was to “maybe mention writing and focus in the intro.”, as they had mentioned they had trouble writing the paper because of distractions with technology. The mentioning of focus would help the writer pivot more into distractions than the abrupt changes that were in the draft. At first, I was extremely worried about peer review, because I thought my peers might get offended, but now I’m fairly confident with peer review in knowing that it is important to help my peers and give them feedback to help aid them in their work.
