My approach to peer review has definitely evolved throughout the semester. In the beginning, we were still accustomed to peer reviewing the way we had in high school. Myself and many of my peers said that high school peer reviews were more focused on local concerns and grammar, rather than the ideas and analysis presented in the writing. Many of us felt that this style of peer revision was somewhat ineffective because it revolves around more trivial parts of the paper. Our approach to peer review was much more helpful because it forced you to look at not only the small local concerns in the writing, but also the larger global concerns. This forced the reader to consider the overall message of the paper.
Some things that I tended to look for in a paper that I was reading is how well the quotes were integrated. We spent a lot of time using templates for using quotes and analyzing them and going into depth relating them to our thesis. The most critical part of this was the analysis. I think it is important to include your own voice in your analysis and I made that comment on a few of my peers’ papers because I know it is something I struggled with during writing as well. For example, in paper three, a lot of my peer review comments were saying that I would have liked to see why the lessons we have learned during the pandemic are important and why we should remember them. At the beginning of the semester I would have never suggested using your own voice so much in writing, but now I find that it brings meaning to our writing.
Along with addressing global concerns like analysis, we were encouraged to address local concerns. To me, this meant fixing some awkward sentences and ideas that may not connect or flow as well as they should. I think that this helps with the overall flow of the paper so it keeps readers from being distracted from the main arguments.
Finally, one of the more helpful parts of the peer review is the feedback letter. This brings together all of the critiques we made throughout the paper into a larger comment. I found this really helpful during the peer review process because you can explain your thought process of some of your comments throughout the paper, and explain why you think these changes are necessary. The feedback letter also forces the person reviewing the paper to focus on both global and local concerns, even if they did not address both in the comments. I found this helpful because often I would find myself focusing on either more global issues or more local issues in the writing. Then when I got to writing the feedback letter, I was forced to consider the other aspect of the review that I had neglected before. Overall I think this approach to peer review is much more focused and effective, and I even found that writing comments on my classmates’ papers even helped me revise my own papers.
