Peer Review 2: Where Can I Improve?

AJC ajcann.wordpress.com. "Peer Review" via flickr, 5/23/08. CC0 Attribution Share-Alike.

Looking at sources outside of your class, even other classes, can allow you to improve yourself and find new ways or new focuses and lenses to look at your own skills, especially writing. Following is my thoughts on two peer reviews, one for Fernando Coronado's Killer Robots, reviewed here, and a second for Cynthia Morton's draft, reviewed here. The three questions below help me learn from the review I did for the two other writers, and will allow me to improve my own draft. What comments do you have for my draft. See my draft in a previous post.

1. What did you learn about your own project (or the project in general) by comparing drafts of the same project in different genres?

 I learned from Fernando Coronado's quick reference guide, that my writing style, and especially my use of the college essay, makes me write a lot more than I need to in order to present the information. While all of the extra writing makes it sound fluid, some of it is unnecessary, and should be cut out in editing. I also learned, that paragraphs do make blocks of text that are harder for the audience to read compared to a guide with leading titles and informative paragraphs. I learned this project may lend itself more to the quick reference guide genre, but that I can still make the college essay work, just with more word usage and conventions.

2. I want you to plan on doing revision between now and our next class meeting on Tuesday. Tell me the top three issues or problems with your draft in its current form and what you plan on doing over the weekend to address those issues.

 The first main issue I have seen with my draft is that I haven't adequately explained the discussion's place in public, as in how the stakeholders presented their arguments and how the public sees these sides. This means over the weekend I will do more research on how my stakeholder's presented their arguments and I will include a paragraph dedicated to this issue or add on sentences to my current paragraphs explaining the public arguments.
The second issue I ran into was how lengthy my paragraphs were, and how this distracted the audience from reading the real content. Over the weekend I will reread my entire essay and break down the structure of the essay into smaller, more workable paragraphs that still encompass the issues.
The third issue I saw was that I didn't present my topic in a concise manner, coming from Gabby's comment on her blog review. Some of my sentences are too long and this distracts from the effect on the reader, reinforced by Gabby's comments on my draft. This issue will also have me rereading my essay, but instead, breaking up sentences, and creating better organization for my ideas within the paragraphs, that would allow me to communicate better and fix a small issue I have with relating my knowledge to the audience.

3. Tell me the top three strengths of your draft. How/why are these things strengths? How will you build on them to make the rest of the draft as strong?


One of the top strengths of my draft, according to my commenters, is that is does catch your attentions, especially with the vivid introduction that allows the reader to envelope themselves in the history of NASA and the awe that one might have seen its accomplishments. I can build on this by also creating a catchy conclusion that will wrap up the essay and give the reader a strong idea of the discussion I am trying to present to them.
Due to the fact that I have a strong introduction, I also tried to work on the flow of the essay, which to me is a strong point. While some of the paragraphs and sentences are long, their are adequate transitions between ideas and relationships between my points that are developed onward in the essay. This helps my reader connect all of the information being presented to them, and can only be helped further with my future attention to the structure of the paragraphs and sentence length that will improve the flow of the essay.
My third strength is the decent amount of information I can present to the audience in this essay. There are many opinions on this topic and a few different groups with high stakes in the controversy, that make it easy to fill the essay with information. Once I have hammered down presenting all of the information in a clear and consistent manner it will allow me to translate all of this information into a well done working essay that will summarize my controversy, and present all of the points needed.