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.
Learning Outcome 4: Peer Review
Learning Outcome 4 states that students should 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. Over this course, I have learned what it takes to be an effective editor of not only my classmates’ work, but my own work as well. At the beginning, when I completed my first peer review, I was hesitant to add constructive criticism into my comments, and often only gave praise, but never suggestions on how to improve the paper. My editing wasn’t much of a critique, it really focused on the local level. As the semester went on, I got more comfortable with the idea of critiquing someone else’s work without fear of hurting their feelings or stepping over boundaries that weren’t open to me. I developed a strong eye for seeking out the main argument and claims of a paper, noticing if quotations were correctly cited in MLA format, and also addressing if there was an effective naysayer. In my chosen peer review, I gave good suggestions about what I believed my peer review need to change in order for their paper to be the best it could. For example, in my chosen peer review, comment number 9, which focuses on ideas and organization, states, “This seems to be a restatement of your main argument. I feel like in some places you seem very supportive of big data and in other places you are against it, try to make your stance a little more clear to your reader.” This sort of comment is one that I wouldn’t have made before taking this class. My ability to peer review papers has also made editing my own papers much easier because I have trained my brain to look for certain things that I can fix to make my paper more well-rounded. When I began to peer review, I focused on local issues instead of global, which is where I was in the wrong. However, as the semester went on, I began to look more globally while I was peer reviewing, which in turn, helped me with my self-revisions. Since I had trained my brain to look for global issues first in peer reviews, and then move on to local, that is what I tended to do in my self-editing as well.
