Peer Review Experience

Overall, I felt that the Peer Review was a beneficial activity for developing a better essay. Through my classmates reading my essay, I found that I used a significant amount of unnecessary summary that sounded nice (aka how I wrote in my high school's advanced English courses), rather than really delving into my own ideas and expanding on them. It was also pointed out to me that my use of quotes, sentence structure, and general organization could be more effective. Through reading my classmates' essays, I was given a new perspective of how they processed the assignment mentally, and how they went about executing it. Another thing that stood out to me in this process is what naturally appears to me as a flaw when I am reading a paper. During high school, the significance of word variation, grammar, and spelling was extremely prominent in the perceived quality of a paper, rather than truly excavating the text and molding new ideas and connections from it. This experience, along with the reviewing of the sample papers and comments, helped me get a better sense of the quality of my essay, and the areas where it needs more work.