Peer review has been extremely beneficial to my final drafts of essays. Unlike my peer review in high school which focused on grammatical errors and sentence structure, peer review in college helps with ways to make your essay better by using global revision which is big picture stuff such as organization, paragraph structure, arguments, and evidence as well as local revision which is the way you manage your sentences to enhance specificity or clarity. When reviewing with my peers this semester I was offered to bolster my argument like adding more specificity to an example, making my thesis statement clearer, or adding more analysis after a quotation. Having someone to work with wasn’t only beneficial because of the comments they left on my essays but by being able to read their work I was able to see what worked well for them and tweak their style into my own essay. Whether it was their play on words or their uses of examples to pull me in, I feel that a lot of the growth I have undergone this semester has been through peer review. It pushed me to slow down, rethink why certain choices mattered, and become more intentional with how I present my ideas. It also helped me see my writing from a reader’s perspective, which made my revisions more purposeful and less about fixing mistakes and more about shaping meaning. Overall, peer review has become one of the most important tools in improving how I write and how I think about writing.


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