Peer Review Multimodal Essay

Throughout high school, peer review was one of my favorite parts of drafting an essay. However, I found myself leaving comments on local edits such as grammar, spelling, etc. College has changed this completely, and I have now realized that peer review should focus more on global edits rather than local. Often, it’s the big things that students miss out on when it comes to writing their essays, and it’s often topics in which peer review can help with. If your thesis is not clear, if your topics don’t match with your thesis, or if your quotes aren’t backed up, then a second perspective from a peer will help clear this issue. Throughout the college peer review process, I believe that I have grown significantly, with some more space to grow even more. In our final peer review session, I found my comments to be much more helpful when it comes to revising compared to before. In the PDF I have linked above, there the comments highlighted in pink are the ones that I left for my peer to take into consideration. While his essay was well written, there were a few comments that I added so that he could make his argument even stronger. Our writing prompt was to simply talk about how viewing our life as a narrative effects us. As I read through his paper, I noticed that he had brought up his own connection to viewing life as a narrative but just simply stated his experience. I suggested that he elaborate on how had he not viewed life this way, then what would he be like now? Would things change? Not only would it make his connection stronger, but it would also make his stance on narratives and their importance stronger. I also noticed that he was missing transition sentences, leaving his reader with three topics that he talked about then abruptly stopped. Although while I believe this peer review session was my best one for the course, I know that I still have plenty of room to grow. At times for me, it was difficult leaving more than two comments on someone’s paper because I was never really sure what to suggest to them. I found myself resorting back to what the other peer reviewer was suggesting, rather than focusing on my own suggestions. Looking towards the future, I feel prepared and as if I have enough knowledge to read a peer’s paper, and give them some advice as to how, globally, they can improve their paper.