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.
In high school, I really didn’t like doing peer-review. I was always nervous having someone else judge my writing, and I also didn’t like commenting on someone else’s paper. This is because I always felt bad putting negative comments down on someone else’s work and felt like I was patronizing when I left something positive. It was a lose-lose situation. So to avoid more “mean” comments, I would just focus on typos and local revision. Now though, because of the emphasis on global revision, I more readily write down what I think should be worked on and have gotten used to the process. If you compare my peer review comments in Audrey’s Paper 1 versus her Paper 3, you can see that I’ve gained more confidence in writing my peer reviews. My comments in her Paper 1 all either ended in question marks or deflected the blame for any negative comments on what the teacher would think instead of what I think. For instance, one of my annotations (in response to a comment made by the author herself about whether to include a topic or not) stated that, “It could be cool to incorporate in the paper, for sure. Im not sure how Prof. Center will feel about it being a loose piece though, maybe try and connect it to another article? Closest I can think of would be Gay and societal expectations of gender – could be a better one though,”. I referred my comments to the teacher’s opinion and included a question mark and showed by doubt in my own ideas at the end with “could be a better one though”. However, as seen in her Paper 3, my comments no longer had the question marks attached to them and I didn’t deflect any negative criticisms as coming from anyone else. I was more confident and commented on a certain segment, “Do you mean to say “doesn’t try”? Because the “What Jamison does do, however, is” gives mixed messages,”. This growth in the peer revision process has made me more comfortable looking over someone else’s work, but has also made me more willing to have my own pieces looked at and judged. I see this as a positive change in my writing career and now find myself looking forward to many more peer reviews in the future.
