In my early efforts of peer review I focused more on local problems such as grammatical and sentence level error. I typically would make comments as I read the paper. This was not ideal, it kept me focused on local errors rather than helping advise a better skeleton or the main points to the paper. For instance, in Hannah Hutchins peer review most of my comments were about rearranging sentences, flow and clarity of the paper. When her sentences were confusing and a little wordy, I stated, “Rearrange the sentence so it will be to the point and clear.” Doing this helped me in writing my own papers because I saw the same mistakes, I was making and thought about the advice peers would give me. Also, in the development of marking my peers draft I would read their introduction and see if they gave proper background information on the topic or did, they just assuming the reader knew what texts they were bring in. One comment I mention, “Your assuming people know what Soylent is.” One of the big mistakes in writing is assuming. We were taught to always give background information of what we are writing about. When reading the “They Say/ I Say” book I gathered that sandwiching a quote is the proper way to introduce it and explain why the quote is important for your text. I found that in my peer review some of my peers left quotes “hanging”, just dropping a quote in the paper with on reason. Over the semester I learned to read their whole essay before making a single comment. This helps with focusing on more of the global revision; like giving constructive advice on their thesis, claims, quotes, structure of a paragraph, and their conclusion. In my peer review process, I learn that telling them what they did right was a guide on what moves they are good at in writing. As a reader and peer reviewer, raising questions that cross my mind, points that may have not occurred to my peer author helped them with the global revision of their work also.
