From looking back at my first peer review, I can see that I have come a long way to get to where I am now. In my first peer review, I noticed that I didn’t really give much useful feedback. What I mean by this, is that I gave plenty of comments but they were mostly comments that praised the work of my peer, not comments that gave them suggestions about what they could do to improve their paper. I think I did this because I was a little bit shy, and I was nervous to edit someone’s paper that I wasn’t familiar with, therefore, I might’ve held back a bit. However, as time went on and I began to learn more about my classmates, it go much easier to complete a peer review. Each peer review we did, I got more comfortable making comments that contained some constructive criticism. I wasn’t afraid of making these comments because I knew that it was what I had to do to help my peer the most that I could, and speaking for myself, I wouldn’t want a peer reviewer that didn’t give me any tips on how to improve my writing.
I am glad we got so many opportunities to do peer reviews in this class because I feel like it helped me better my skills in editing my own paper as well. Doing peer reviews, looking at all of the requirements and all of the topics to search for in their paper, made me much more apt to look for it in my own paper. Before practicing with peer review, whenever I would write a first draft to a paper, I always had a really hard time changing it because I could never really find anything that I thought needed to be changed. Now, I have no trouble finding mistakes or things that I can change in my paper because peer reviewing has trained my mind to look for them.
