Outcome 4: As mentioned in my writing for outcome 1, I found my peer reviews of others to be missing critical details. My critiques seemed to bounce between slight nitpicking and harsh sounding complaint, at least from my end. Maybe I’m being somewhat hard on myself and they actually aren’t harsh nor are they nitpicking, but I just can’t find it in myself to critique other peoples work. It makes me feel bad. Conversely, I wish people would be harsher regarding critiquing my work. In my previous high school English classes peer review was almost unheard of. Our reviews where often in the form of writing on rough drafts between the teacher and the student. As such I didn’t have too much prior knowledge about how to critique in a gentle manner, but I knew what to look for in regard to structure and diction.

The most recent extensive peer review done was of Celine’s empathy essay. Outside of changing minor spelling errors I didn’t touch the grammar. However, there was a couple times when I was slightly confused while reading a sentence, so I tried to suggest some alternate wording. Other times I told Celine to cut off bits and parts of sentences because I thought they extrapolated too much or that the idea just didn’t make sense to me. Looking back on those comments I feel like I was too harsh, but at the same time I wanted to help make the essay better. A couple times I complimented parts that where well written but needed to have a bit more added in order to give the argument some more meet, like in Celine’s take down of Yo-Yo Ma’s ideals.

On the second rough draft review I found myself complimenting the parts added to make up for any perceived harshness. However, I still had some niggles with parts of the essay that I questioned whether to tell Celine or not. I felt like giving any more constructive criticism beyond what I had given the first time was just me being somewhat mean. Especially since Celine barely gave any bad critiques over my second draft. On the other hand, I myself was wanting more from the peer reviews of my essays and I knew that the whole point of critiquing wasn’t to be nice. It was to offer valuable feed back to improve their essay. I’m not sure if this is a common criticism of the peer review process or not, but I think it maybe would have been better to do face to face peer reviews of papers in groups rather than through the toneless text of a computer. However, I am very much aware that we where short on time and had to make do with peer reviews outside of class. Overall, I think my critiquing could use a little bit of work. Especially since it can be a valuable skill outside of English majors.