When I viewed my peer’s marked up the first draft, I found that at the beginning of the semester I was already focusing on global revision and the idea of relating the claims back to the overall thesis, but I was able to develop my skills as the semester progressed. At first, I focused on including comments related to how my peer could have elaborated more on a certain idea, without offering them much guidance on how they could implement this into their essay, but during the second peer review, I started to see improvement in my peer review skills. For example, during the second peer review, one of my comments related to the idea of adding more of their opinion into the body paragraphs instead of just summarizing what the author said. By adding comments like these, we were able to have a pleasant conversation on how they could incorporate their own interpretations into their writing while still having a balance between their own opinions and the author’s ideas.
Also, I focused on how my peer could improve the organization and flow of their essay by rearranging paragraphs. For example, at the end of their essay, they began to use quotes without incorporating them with their main argument and wrote two naysayer paragraphs that discussed common topics. Overall, focusing on global rather than local edits has allowed me to help my peers improve the structure and organization of their essays as well as their interpretations in relation to their summarizing of the sources. I still need to work on realizing where certain quotes need more explanation or more analysis on my own and in my peer’s writing.
