English 134 Portfolio
Peer Review
The next stage in my writing process is Peer Review. For class, we did peer review assignments with our groups. These were especially significant to me since my peers were able to tell me if my writing was understandable and effective in providing them with information about my topic. I also utilized my roommates, friends, and family, to get a wide variety of input from different perspectives, as my attended audience would also be diverse. Just like I might get someone’s opinion about my Lego building: Is the building strong? Does it look cool? I can ask similar questions with my writing: Is the writing understandable? Does it effectively showcase my topic and achieve whatever goal I am trying to get my audience to do or feel? All of these are important questions that I want to think about when I am writing, and peer reviews are a great way to check in to make sure I am on the right track. Peer reviews are not just important because they can help me clarify my writing to my audience, but they also can give me new ideas if I am stuck in choosing which Lego brick to use next or which idea to move forward with.
One of the main things I focus on when looking at my peer reviews is making sure that my audience understands what I am writing about. Sometimes the sentence makes sense in my head, but when someone else reads it they are utterly confused. I often forget that my audience can’t read my thoughts and I sometimes need to be more descriptive or clearer in my writing. For sequence 1, one of my group members gave me some very helpful feedback (shown on the right) about rewording some sentences for clarity and adding more details to help the audience better understand what was going on in my head. With this feedback, I reworded the first highlighted sentence to be: “I looked at her like she was crazy. I hoped for her to share some forbidden secret that would magically grant me the ability to write without wanting to pull out my hair or throw my computer at the wall. I had just told her how much I hated writing, and her excellent advice was to write more” (Howard, Sequence 1). Both of these peer suggestions made my final draft much more impactful for the audience and made my writing stronger.
*My final submission can be found on the final submission web page.
Sequence 1
Sequence 2
Before we interviewed our subject for sequence 2, we were able to get peer feedback on our interview questions. To the left is a photo of what I received on my interview questions from my groupmates in class. I found this activity to be extremely helpful because I was struggling to find ways to best word the questions I wanted to ask Eric during the interview. My peers were very helpful in giving me suggestions and making sure all of my questions were opened- ended and not closed. Without my peers' feedback, I wouldn’t have had the questions that I used quotes from in my essay, which makes this activity and peer reviewing so significant in the writing process. This activity was also eye-opening on the flip side because I got to see what kinds of questions my peers were asking their subjects and I was able to develop new ideas for questions for myself based on their writing.
Similar to Sequence 1, Sequence 3 is another good example of how I used my peer reviews to make sure my writing was understandable to the audience. Seen in the writing artifact to the right on the second highlighted sentence, I received a comment about clarity in my writing. It was critical for this sentence to be clear because it was part of my thesis statement and highly significant to my essay. I knew that I need to do some serious rewording to make sure that my thesis sentences were understandable to the audience. In the second photo, you can see the final introduction paragraph for my essay with the new thesis statement. I took a lot of time to fix this sentence, and as you can see, it turned out quite different. However, I think it is much clearer in the final draft. Without peer reviews on this essay, I might not have realized that my thesis wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it was. I am extremely thankful for the feedback I received from both of my groupmates because it made me a better writer and helped to teach me the importance of peer reviewing in the writing process.
Sequence 3
