The Benifits of Peer Review

I believe I started doing a form of peer review when I was in the fourth grade through an activity my teacher called the writers workshop. Besides being able to share your writing with your classmates, peer reviews were not very effective at such a young age. Now that I am older I do feel that peer reviews can be very beneficial depending on one thing, whom your peer is. If the person who is reading your paper doesn’t really care to read or make adjustments to improve your best interest then a peer review is a complete waste of time. Fortunately for me the person who read my paper did provide some positive insights on ways I can improve my writing in addition to some constructive criticism. I found that it was helpful to write on the top of your paper what you wanted the reader to look for, this of assistance to both the writer and the reader. The main changes that I felt needed to be made was that I was not given a lot of time to talk with the person who read my paper instead it was just written here is what you did wrong, now go fix it. I do not feel that this was the fault of the person who edited my paper but instead the lack of time and the awkwardness of not knowing one another was to blame.

Reading another classmates paper, who was given the same topic as me was very interesting because our papers were truly polar opposites. It was hard to tell that we even had the same rubric; this is not necessarily a bad thing considering we both covered the required material. I just found it rather noteworthy the way people perceive the same thesis differently. Reading another persons paper gave me a clearer understanding of what my paper was lacking in terms of details and significance of events. Personally I wanted to receive as much feedback as possible, I kept this in mind when editing my class mates paper and I tried to put in as much effort as I would expect my peer to do for me. The biggest challenge when editing a classmate’s paper is giving detailed suggestions without rewriting the paper for them.

Once I received my paper post revision I was impressed with the comments and feedback I was given. Every suggestion and correction that was made is beneficial and a step in the right direction in getting my paper to its full potential. The comment that I will implement most will be rewriting my first event so that it is more concrete and distinguished. It is sometimes hard to receive criticism and determine if it is in fact worth taking and following up on, but over all I know that all the suggestions made on my paper were in fact helpful and will be present in my final draft. Peer review is proof that we are sometimes too blind to see what is wrong in our own work because it is a product of us.