Peer Review

Peer review helped me a lot during this semester. Honestly, some of my work was a complete mess before it was peer reviewed. There are some paragraphs where my peer reviewer, most of the time Arth, wrote all over it and there are so many pencil marks and scribbles that it is nearly unrecognizable as the original paragraph that it was.

During the Analysis essay, I wrote about the movie Slumdog Millionaire. In one of the paragraphs in my essay, I talked about the setting of the movie, and it was an absolute disaster before it was peer reviewed.

BEFORE:

Wow look at that mess.

AFTER:

Isn't it beautiful?

One thing that needed to be fixed with this paragraph was repetition. I know that when I write I tend to repeat myself, even though I don't realize it. It is something that when I proofread myself that I must be aware of, and even then sometimes I don't catch the repetition. 

For example, in this paragraph the first and last sentences are almost exactly the same. That is really unnecessary, since I think the reader probably gets the point after I state it in the first sentence, but I repeated the exact same thing at the end of the paragraph. Luckily, Arth read it and pointed it out to me, as you can see by all the scribbles and notes, and in my final essay, that sentence is totally gone.

The bigger issue with this paragraph was the general disorganization. As you can see in the paragraphs above, there was a lot of editing of this paragraph, and the end result looks almost nothing like the original, except for the first sentence. Peer review helped me to organize my thoughts because I did not realize just how messy the paragraph was because it was my invention and I knew exactly what I wanted it to say. Peer review allowed to get a second perspective on my writing that was filled with helpful comments like, "reword this" and "move this here" and scribbling out some words. In the end, even some of the sentences that were supposed to be reworded wer cut and new, better sentences were created and put into the essay that helped with the organization and clarity of the paragraph.

 

I had never realized the importance of peer review before this semester. The second perspective that I received during peer review greatly enhanced my writing by making by making sure that my essay flowed, made sense, was meeting the guidelines and had no elementary grammatical errors. Without peer review, all of my essays this year would definitely not be up to the same standard that they were.