Peer review is an important step in the writing process as it opens lots of opportunities to strengthen your essay and learn as a writer. It allows you to gain others’ opinions and it’s always good to have another set of eyes read over your essay for global and local revisions. Over this semester I have become better at peer review, in my first peer reviews I left comments like: “I like how you framed the quote” or “long sentence”. Although, by my final ones I was able to give good constructive criticism on how to better their ideas or elaborate on them. I dug deeper into their essays, made sure they had a strong thesis, and that it flowed together nicely. I left comments like: “expand/ specify what your ideas mean” for lily and for Malayna I left a comment about her sentence structure and told her specifically what was confusing about it and how she could word it better. Important things I learned to be a good peer reviewer include rereading the essay more than once, looking at the overall structure and then going into the sentence level revisions. Then, at the end wrapping it up with a nice feedback letter pointing out the good in their essay along with the ideas they could connect and areas they can strengthen. Peer reviewing isn’t my greatest strength, but I am open minded and am aware that I have room to grow and improve.
