Peer Review

This week, we were assigned to upload the first part of the advocacy essays onto Connect and also do peer reviews. The first AP essay that I had reviewed was about the way apes communicate and their cognition. Upon reading this person's writing, I was first impressed by the variety of sources they included in their essay, along with how they seemed to hit every point required. I didn't have to advise this person a lot on their essay, considering, I found it to be pretty well written. However, when I did advise them on things, I mainly advised them to change their wording to make their writing flow better. I also have this person tips on how to connect certain questions and paragraphs to the main topic of the essay, in order to emphasize the central idea. One piece of advice that I believed to be beneficial to their writing was about how they could make their reading more convincing and engaging to the readers by highlighting the consequences if their animal went extinct. Here is a screenshot of the advice:

I also reviews another student's advocacy paper on corvid intelligence. When I read this paper, I slightly struggled to follow along with their essay due to the organization of their paragraphs and because I believe they might have misunderstood the instructions to the essay. This person had done a literature review of some sort on potential solutions or issues rather than including their previous literature review and elaborating on the issues that the species faced. To help them, I gave them advice on what the AP essay was supposed to include and how they could restructure their essay to make it more easy to follow along with. I feel like the best comments that I gave were about how they could relate their current writing to the Literary Essay that we had done previously and I summarized what I thought the purpose of the whole AP essay was.

Overall, the peer review throughout this whole quarter has been quite educational. I find that whenever I review my peers' works, it teaches me a lot about what I should include or change in my own essays and gives me new perspectives on writing styles. When I review other students' writing, I typically focus a lot on their wording and structure because I personally feel like my vocabulary is limited. By reading their work, I pick up new vocabulary that I could potentially use and incorporate in my own writing to make it sound or flow better. Something that stood out to me was a lot of students in this course are intelligent and it is always a good thing to bounce off of each other and to uplift one another through tips and advice. Advice that I had received from my peers that has really stuck with me is how I should elaborate more on my sources after citing them. This advice made me think a lot deeper about why I was including this source and what it contributes to the essay, allowing me to weed out whether it is necessary or not. I also found myself making a lot of mistakes on my citations and my peers really helped me catch the errors.

At first, I was intimidated by how well written my peers' writing was when doing reviews. It made me self conscious about my own writing because I felt like mine would not measure up to theirs. I started the quarter feeling as if I had writer's block and struggled with beginning the essays because I believed it would not be as good as the other students', however, I soon found myself being motivated to improve my own writing. The more I reviewed their writing, the more I was exposed to different styles and language that I could incorporate into my own. I would pick up a variety of little things from other students (ex: vocabulary, transition phrases, structure) and combine them all to make it my own. It is because of this realization that peer review is extremely important in writing. Not only do you find your own mistakes when you read other student's writing, but you also receive feedback on what you are doing right or what you can improve on. The positive feedback that i would get from students reassured me that I was doing alright and the constructive criticism only made me better. The criticism is what I would remember to bring into my future writing. Also, reviewing work from other students or authors allows me to distinguish what sources are effective or useful to include. They teach me what to look for and what to avoid, establishing ethos. Overall, peer review has been one of the best things for my writing because it motivated me to improve myself instead of sitting there being discouraged.