My experience with peer review before taking this class was very minimal, it consisted of a quick scan of someone’s paper and really only focusing on sentence level mistakes. This only scraped the surface of peer review because besides looking for grammatical mistakes, the ideas, structure, or message behind a paper has to be clear and easily followed by the reader. This is where I feel this class helped me a lot, the peer review I did during this semester went beyond looking at local concerns and focused a lot on global concerns of my peer’s papers. I believe my best peer review work was done during Project #2 when I was peer reviewing Kayla’s paper. In my review, I really tried to focus less on the small errors or suggestions and tried to prompt Kayla with bigger ideas and questions. When Kayla was talking about the ideas between the Prophets and Wizards, as I mentioned I tried to push her thinking by asking “What do you think the best compromise is? Do we take the best aspects from both sides? What parts about the Wizards technology do you feel is why they are better suited to solve this crisis compared to Prophets?” I tried to push Kayla with her thinking so not only would she include her reasoning in voice more into her paper, but to also try and make her critically think on the ideas she already had in her paper, and expand on them. Although I tried to focus more on global concerns while peer reviewing, I didn’t forget the importance of grammar and sentence structure. I made sure to mark any suggestions I thought needed correcting.
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