In high school, I had never done a peer review to edit my papers for English. I have always relied on the teachers comments on my rough draft in order to fix it for the final draft. This was very challenging for me during the first peer review because I did not know what to comment on in the paper. We were told to focus on the global errors, which I had a very hard time doing because I was not familiar with editing at all. In class, we would get together with our groups and talk about each paper for fifteen minutes, which was very hard because all I had commented on were the local and small global errors. As I commented on my peer’s paper I tried to focus on the ideas, so that I could edit very specifically. This has benefited me to learn how to help people connect their ideas and this has even helped me with transitions in my paper. As the semester went, I was able to learn from the peer reviews I received and from what Elisha taught us in class to become stronger in editing other papers. I found it hard to keep my opinion from affecting my editing on other papers, so I overcame this by rereading the essay and commenting on it the second time I read. In the peer review section of my webpage, I put the last paper of the semester edits because I believe this is when I was able to get a grasp on how important it was to look at the bigger picture along with the small local edits. In the paper attached, I noticed that at the bottom of the first page the information given was not very clear with facts. She was on the right track of information, but when she added it, it did not serve as she intended it too. It seemed to complicate the argument, so I was able to give advice to strengthen the argument and add more explanation about how her papa influenced her. Overall, I believe that throughout the semester I was able to improve significantly. Lastly, after we received our own papers back with peer comments we had to make corrections to our own work. I found this hard the first time around because all of my peer editors had similar, but different thoughts. I chose to rework my second paragraph of the significant writing project because I did not connect my sentences and I lacked an explanation on the information that I gave in the part about my mom.
