I thought the peer revisions went really well. At first I was very iffy as to how it would work, and if I would be able to understand all of the criticism, considering it was not in person. However, this ended up not being the case at all. I thought this way of group revisions worked very well. I do wish that there was a more efficient way of making corrections on their papers. When I can read a hard copy of a paper, I seem to write all over it, leaving grammatical corrections, comments, and smiley faces all over the paper. However there was no way to do that on here. I guess it is just the teacher in me that wants to comment all over essays. I also feel like the responses back were quite broad. In the classroom, I think that it is sometimes easier for classmates to write all over a paper and hand it back, which would give me more comments. I think this way, however, worked out a lot better than I imagined it would.
For this week we had to write and post our rough draft of our very first essay! When writing the essay I knew it was a very “sloppy” copy for myself. I knew it was going to need a lot of work, but was looking really forward to reading my groups feedback. After posting and reading the feedback, I feel that I have truly gained a lot of quality information on what to add to my essay. One of my group members, Molly, pointed out the fact that my topic was much different than most of the others. This made me very happy. I think as a writer, it is important to define yourself in your own way, and I really tried to do that with this piece. Because of that I based this essay around my own feelings, and those of the people around me- Writing is too rule based now-a-days! I think writing has begun to turn people away because of all of the rules we must follow. I thought that Gere and Bartholomae did a wonderful job giving points and reasoning for this, and I could really connect. After reading both posts by my two group members, I also realized that I need to add more quotes. I have always been very iffy about quotes and interpreting them. Therefore, I am challenging myself to add more quotations in my writing this semester. I feel that this would be a good time to set this goal for myself, considering I feel so comfortable in this class. Overall the feedback really did help me as a writer, not only of this essay but in general for this semester.
I think because we are "naturally" corrective readers, it *is* hard to refrain from commenting on typos, spelling errors, and grammatical issues--the impulse is to comment on *everything* that may not be "working" in a draft. BUT...a lot of surface commentary can be saved for the proofreading that a writer does before s/he turns in the final revision of a paper. And I think the purpose of guided peer assessment (where there are questions to consider as one reads peers' drafts) is to keep the focus on the larger picture of how meaning is made and constructed in the essay, and whether that is working for the reader(s).
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