Peer Review: Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process.

When I was in high school I never found peer review to be helpful. I used to always say that word had spell check so peer review was useless. I had no clue that peer review wasn’t supposed to only be focused on sentence level errors. Learning about global revision not only helped me better help my peers, but it helped me look at the bigger picture when writing my own essay. During this course I realized that peer review is a vital tool to be used in the writing process. I found myself relying heavily on the comments left by my peers. I have a bad habit of briefly mentioning my ideas, but not going in depth because I think they make sense. It was nice to have someone who I haven’t told my stories to look over my stories and tell me if they make sense or not. I also found that reviewing my classmates essays helped me in my writing process. I was able to see how others explained their points and that helped me consolidate and better explain my points. It was also nice to see the positive comments left by my peers. I had never thought that showing what others did well would help in the writing process. When someone would leave a positive comment, it would increase my confidence in my writing and give me motivation when I felt stuck.

Work Sample 1: Comment left on a body paragraph from essay 1.

This is an example of a positive comment left by a classmate. It was very encouraging to see that I was properly using my personal experiences to back up my thesis.

Work Sample 2: Comment left on a body paragraph from essay 1.

This is an example of someone pointing out where I could elaborate more. When drafting the essay I thought that one sentence would be enough to get my point across. It was helpful to hear that explaining something that I thought may be irrelevant could help make the essay more interesting.