I feel peer reviewing can be one of the most important things to do when writing a paper. When you have to write a paper and edit it on your own you will probably miss things because you’ve been looking at it for so long. A new perspective from another person can help find portions of the text that the audience doesn’t understand or new suggestions to make your paper even better. When I do peer reviews I feel like it is very important to ask questions and I feel as if I have done so in all of my peer reviews. In my first peer review, I asked lots of good questions in order to help the writer figure out what they wanted their paper to say or make it more clear. For example, I asked questions such as “is this the main point of this paragraph?” or “is this what you want your main focus to be?” I feel this questions can help the writer look at specific parts of their essay to find key ideas they have and can use to improve the paper. I’ve done this throughout my peer reviews in even in my third peer review, I asked the writer of the essay if they could give an example of an experience that was uplifting or tragic instead of just stating that they’ve had these experiences. By being able to give the example it helps the audience connect more with the paper and/or the author as well. I feel I’ve always given good suggestions in my peer reviews about changes they could make. In the first peer review I made the suggestion of creating a counter argument with an idea that was already present in the paper. The only area for ongoing growth in my peer reviews would be looking only at global revisions. As a writer I am always looking for local revisions because they are easy to fix but it is more beneficial to give global revisions as a peer because it will help the writer of the paper more rather than only fixing grammatical errors. For example, in my third peer review I made a comment about a specific in-text citation in the first paragraph. I feel it is helpful to make one comment about it so they can fix it but for first drafts it may be more important for me to focus on the global revisions first. I feel I have done a good job of shying away from local revisions in most of my peer reviews but it is still something I should be cautious of.
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