The Value of Peer Reviews

Peer reviews are a very useful tool if done correctly. My experience with them in other writing classes is that those who review my works of art are too polite and only tell me what a great job that I’ve done and really offer no constructive criticism. The draft stage is a perfect time for peer reviews, it’s not done yet and still in the formulation stages, there are going to be mistakes both in style and organization because of that. It’s easy to spot errors and it gives the peer review person every opportunity to point those out, and learn more about their own papers in the process.

It seems like when we are in the revision stages of a paper, we often miss obvious errors because we’ve gone over the paper so many times, a second sight is worth a million bucks! I often have my wife read my papers, let me know which paragraphs need work on, or which sentences aren’t clear, but also what I left out or what is unnecessary. She’s a great peer review person and a wonderful proofreader. On the other hand I am not!

Sometimes I see it and other’s I don’t, then I have difficulties explaining what I think is wrong, there is a void between my mind and my mouth and it doesn’t always communicate effectively, I suppose that is because I don’t often have the opportunity to perform peer reviews now that my daughters are gone and no longer ask me to do it for them.

We need to know the TRUTH, it may offend some, but it’s better than being too nice. We are supposed to express what we like and don’t like about the paper, help identify the thesis statement if we can, and then figure out if the paragraphs follow the thesis structure and fulfill those statements or not. The only way that I could think of doing that, was to use the post draft outline tool, which we learned in the last unit.

APA format is hard enough for me to figure out in my own paper, how the heck will I point out these types of errors in other student’s papers, then what if I am wrong and they follow my advice, how would I feel, who is to blame? It’s a dilemma and I feel that the best way to do this, was to examine all of the papers and decide which ones are correct and which ones are obviously wrong, then go to the Writing Center and verify your findings! After all there is only the title page, first page, in-text citings, and then the reference page and those citings.Sounds like a good learning process to me, maybe the course designers knew that, the blind leading the blind! Oh boy!

Other characteristics that are open for analysis would be the flow of the paper, the writer’s voice and tone, their structure,  each paragraph and then down to each sentence, techniques which they probably learned in Composition I, and which I missed out on.

Introductions and Conclusions would be hard to really evaluate, but if we actually read the paper, break it down with the post draft outline, we should be able to see if everything fits, what’s missing and what else needs to be removed or placed into the introduction or theisis, thanks to the new post draft outline tool.

I went back to the Writing Center and reviewed some writing basics, sentence structure, writing a good paragraph, logical fallacies, how to write a good introduction and conclusion and feel a lot more confident in my abilities to be able to give a few good peer reviews during this unit, and hope that I get some good input too.

This is the seventh week and there are only three more to go before the end of the course. The clock is ticking and time is getting short, it’s good to have these checkpoints to help us remember the deadlines and commitments ahead of us.