Blog Post #3- How Can You Provide Meaningful Feedback to Your Peers?

What Is Peer Editing?

    I have never truly considered what “peer editing” is. Anytime I was asked to proofread work for someone, I mostly concentrated on telling them what was wrong and how to fix it. I have never taken into consideration their feelings and how what I said might affect them. In the video, “What is Peer Editing”, we are given a simple illustration of what peer editing consists of. Peer editing is meant to help your classmates improve their writing by offering positive feedback. There are three steps when editing a peer's work as outlined in the slideshow "Peer Edit With Perfection Tutorial." .

You always compliment their work first. Let them know that you enjoyed reading their work, and tell them what you liked about it. Secondly, you offer suggestions. Suggesting that different word usage or elaboration could make their writing seem more clear would be more effective than telling them that you did not understand or that their work did not make any sense. Thirdly, you make corrections. These corrections can be made publicly or privately, but they should always be made in a respectful and positive manner.

    I greatly enjoyed the video “Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes.” This is a great tool to help you understand what not to do when peer editing. It is not necessary to be a "Picky Patty" or a “Mean Margaret.” In order to provide meaningful feedback to your peer's, you must edit with the utmost respect and understanding. You do not want to tell your peer that their work was terrible and that it was hard to understand. This only tears them down and makes you look extremely rude. When peer editing consider how you would feel if someone had only given you negative feedback and never pointed out any of the positives in your writing. It is essential to successful peer editing to provide positive comments and polite suggestions and corrections.

Peer Editing My Group

    I commented on both Laura Crawford’s and Ashley Railey’s most recent blog posts. I chose to comment publicly on their blogs because I did not feel that they had any errors that were deemed severe enough to address them privately. I feel that a few grammatical errors is not something that needed to be pointed out in private. In the situation that there had been numerous errors, I would have addressed them privately. I feel that I have learned a great deal about peer editing from the videos and tutorials mentioned above and I believe that peer editing is a great tool for students to use in the classroom.