Peer review is a crucial part of academic writing. This is one aspect of writing that I believe should never be taken away from writers, both young and inexperienced and veteran writers with many professional publications and editorials completed. The amount of information that can be gained from a simple peer review is priceless and there should be no shame placed upon a writer who asked for help from a peer. In our case of course, we are still learning the ropes of how to appropriately form ideas and place them into a puzzle to complete the assignment. Some students have higher abilities to create work in a timely fashion that makes sense and tells a great story, others may have more difficulty finding inspiration from a 6-page article just to get some completion points. That is the interesting part about college writing, we all have very different backgrounds and approaches to how we formulate a story. Personally, I don’t see myself as a strong creator, but I can pull from different sources and give my story its own twist in a decent way. That’s the beauty of peer review. We give our stories to other creators and let them experience it firsthand. Without completing full edits, still in its baby form. They have full access to our unedited, raw ideas. But from this, we as the original creators gain access to their thoughts and emotions. Most of the time just short blurbs of appreciation or a note of an easy edit. This is where we can go back in and make the adjustments needed so that future writers may not get confused on a part that was too vague or solidify and strengthen the ending to a defense on how technology has crippled our youth. Below you will find a list of remarks that I had given two other students during our peer review sessions from the semesters first project. Nothing to out of the ordinary in my humble opinion, I think we were all trying to be decent and suggestive rather than disruptive and challenging to the others’ work. Some discuss just some minor changes like grammatical errors or a small rearrangement of words within the sentence. Other comments were more supportive and encouraging that their work was strong and to continue to approach new ideas to bring to the table. This is what a positive and justified peer review should be.

• Peyton
  • THESIS: I like the direction of the thesis, on first read my thoughts were 1- what part of society “forced” this generation in using technology and 2- should 100% of previous generations need to help stop forming bad habits
  • this connecting sentence didn’t flow well on first read; the following sentence seems to expand on your thought when you define “one thing” so maybe rework it to be a 1-1-2-2 instead of 1-2-1-2. bring together the “things” that are related
  • there is a turkle quote about kids in different generations “escaping the real world” by using different means. i don’t have the paper on me but i can find it and link it. if this paragraph needs more in the future you could link in that quote
  • short and to the point, maybe add an example after ‘allow’, something everyone can easily relate to (what future tech might look like)
  • what was used before technology? what did these folks do to work around not being able to communicate with others outside of their close circle
• Steven
  • make sure to add her first name
  • dive into why you may not agree on, make sure to add small amounts of info that leads you to these ideas in 2-3 sentences. these ideas should be the headers of the following paragraphs. they shouldn’t be too wordy, but make sure to introduced what you are trying to say
  • possibly switch the wording to ‘is very important, as I can relate to the passage from Turkle…”conversation’ 
    sounds a bit more professional
  • possibly switch to ‘as previously mentioned’. lets the sentence flow a little better
  • last few sentences were strong and good purpose of getting a point across. maybe add a wrap up sentence about how this all wraps back around to using technology or why that leads to some negative symptoms.
  • Something in the lines of ‘Even though we have access to these different types of technology, we should be cautious about…’
  • if you use ‘we’, remove ‘you’. if you use ‘people’ switch you to they. before ‘they often’ could turn into a comma; it flows well but just make sure to describe who you’re talking about
  • this is awesome paragraph. you hit a lot of great points and it had a good sense of direction. this would be a great conclusion paragraph but if you want to use it as a body paragraph, make sure to add something from this one into your thesis area.
  • this paragraph would fit nicely into the previous one. maybe right before you say ‘Even when we try’. try it out in other spots too to see if it fits elsewhere in that paragraph