Blog Post 3

Providing Meaningful Feedback To Our Peers

I believe providing meaningful feedback to our peers is very important. Telling someone they did a "good job" to speed up peer editing ultimately does not help the person improve. I found each of the videos and the slideshow on peer editing very useful. They were good reminders of what peer editing should be like. Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes showed how we should not act while editing. The example, "Speedy Sandy" was the one that stood out the most to me. "Speedy Sandy" was described as someone who feels like peer editing is a race to the finish line. Although it might not be a "race" to see who is finished first for the older generation having to edit, I feel as though sometimes we get in a hurry because we want to get the editing process over with as soon as possible. Although the video Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes was a fun example of what we should not do as editors, I found the video What Is Peer Editing and the slideshow Peer Edit With Perfection Tutorial much more useful.

Peer editing is making suggestions, comments, compliments,and changes to help improve and revise someone else's writing. In each of these videos and the slideshow, they all encouraged three steps to peer editing. The first step was to start by using compliments. When editing a person's writing we should start by telling that person what he/she did well on. The second step to peer editing is making suggestions. This means giving the person specific ideas to make their writing better. We could give suggestions on things such as word choice, details, organization, sentences, and topics. The last step in peer editing is corrections. When we look for corrections we need to look for punctuation, grammar, sentence, and spelling errors. Peer editing gives us a chance to help improve a persons writing, so giving specific ideas and examples are very important.

The way I have been peer editing my groups writings is by doing so on Google docs which is private. However, I don't intend to peer edit my group privately every time. I feel confident that each person in my group understands that peer editing is a helpful tool which can improve their writing. The reason I have been editing my groups writings privately through Google Docs is because it seems to be easier that way. We have a system planned out and it works really well. We are able to see each group members work all on the same document during group projects and then we edit each others using different color fonts.

When peer editing C4C's however, I edit publicly in the comments that I leave. If I agree I let them know, and if I don't agree I positively give my suggesstions and thoughts. I think it is important to leave meaningful feedback to our peers, and while doing so we need to keep in mind the three steps to peer editing; complementing first, making specific suggestions, and then looking for corrections that need to be made.