Outcome 4 (Peer Review) – 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.

My experience with peer revision was always based on local revision. It was seen as the easy way out of peer reviewing papers, and the best way to not hurt someone’s feelings when revising their papers. There was not much global revision involved, making me uncomfortable with the process of doing peer revisions based solely on global revision. Initially, I did not understand how to peer review global revision, until Professor Brod handed us our annotations sheets to refer to when we were making revisions. This sheet helped set up a basis of what we should be looking at when we are doing peer revisions, and how we can comment and help someone else improve upon their writing. In Figure 1, I have made a comment on my peer Alex’s paper asking if he could relate his current paragraph to another text. On the annotation sheet we were provided, one of the comments we could make on our peers’ papers was seeing if they could relate text to text within their writing. This comment would be an example of suggesting the use of text to text relations within his writing, helping to strengthen his thesis and prove his argument.

Figure 1: Peer Revisions from Alex Woodworth’s Essay #3:

Local revision was something we had to look at after the big changes and global revision was completed. Local revision is mainly focused on grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, spelling etc. Because I have had experience in high school correcting local revision, it was easy to spot in essays, although when we were peer reviewing we did want to focus mainly on global revision. In Figure 2, I have my end comment on Mackenzie Riley’s first essay, and highlighted in blue I have a section that is asking her to check on her local revision, such as grammar and spelling. The rest of the comment is mainly based around global revision, and focusing on quotes, analysis, and organization of her paragraphs. Although we primarily wanted to focus on global revision, it is easy to let the small details slide past us, but they can also make or break a piece of writing. By having improper grammar, it can invalidate a piece of writing, and make the author seem not as trusting or knowledgeable of information.

Figure 2: Peer Revision End Comment on Mackenzie Riley’s Essay #1:

Figure 2: Peer Revision End Comment on Mackenzie Riley’s Essay #1: