Compared to high school the peer review process for me has changed a lot. For one, the purpose of doing peer review is slightly different. In high school for instance I would spend most of the peer review time only looking at local revisions. These are things like grammatical errors, small sentence structure mistakes, and if a paragraph was too short or too wordy. Compared to the peer review process now, while yes I do look for grammatical errors and things like wordiness, the main things I’m looking for are more big picture. This includes things like “does the overall paragraph get the point across to the reader?” Or “Does this source comparison have enough or your voice and does it make your stance clear?” Utilizing peer review for things like overarching themes and connections to the writers ideas/arguments makes the process much more effective. This always for one, a different perspective to look over the writing g which the author could add to their writing to make it appeal to a more diverse audience. And two, it always the authors writing to flow better because instead of small tweaks and changes, making more “bigger picture” changes always the writer to connect more with the reader.
This is an example of what a typical “peer review” might look like in high school. Not a lot and only focuses on small parts of the text. Nor do these annotations mention any sort of overarching themes or “big picture” items.
This end comment is just one example of comments made on a classmates writing that I peer reviewed. This later example of a peer review piece of mine is an example of how I switched from focusing on local revision items in writing to more big picture, global revisions.
