When we first began practicing with peer review, I was unsure of how to approach the subject. Peer review was almost a joke in my high school; we would swap papers with our friends, read them over, and offer minimal critiques, telling them their work was great. We didn’t delve deep into the peer review process, only skimming the surface and looking for grammatical errors. Upon arriving at English 110, I realized that in order to provide constructive feedback, one must immerse themselves in their peers’ work. Only then can one spot the small tweaks that could be made to make the entire paper exceedingly better.
One common edit that I make on my peers’ papers is to add transition sentences or a little background before stating their main point in a paragraph. The reader must have some context as to where you are coming from with your point so you should introduce it before delving right into the argument. The same goes when using quotes. Without context, the reader has no idea why you put the quote where you did no matter how much explaining you do after it. This can all help enhance the flow of one’s paper, something essential to capturing and holding the reader’s attention. Where you choose to place your sentences and paragraphs has a lot to do with the flow of your paper as well. Sometimes, I find that when reading a peer’s paper, I find that certain paragraphs should be shuffled around to go with others more similar to them. I wrote on one paper, “ Maybe move this paragraph to follow your paragraph about food having cultural value. Because you are talking about your own experiences with food and culture, I think these two paragraphs would tie in well together”. Putting similar paragraphs together can especially help when trying to make transitions from one paragraph to the next. Sometimes, paragraphs can even be consolidated into one when the information in both is similar enough. Other times, a sentence or paragraph may need to be broken up. Run-on sentences and extremely long paragraphs may bore the reader or cause them to get lost in all of the information given at once. I found an example of this when one of my peers added a long quote into an already lengthy sentence. “End sentence after the quote and begin a new sentence to allow for better flow. This way, you still introduce the quote and explain it, but with more prose,” I had written.
Over the course of the semester, I have found that I am more engaged with my peers’ papers than I had been at the beginning. Instead of struggling to find something to comment on, I am able to provide constructive criticism that follows the skills we learned in class. I can analyze a paper and make suggestions that I believe will engage the reader even more with their work, which is the goal of writing a successful paper.
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