Case Study

Providing constructive review comments in a succinct yet courteous manner is no easy task. One benefit of completing peer reviews in this class is sharpening your skills in this area, as they can prove quite valuable in your workplace (see Angela's DQ 7 post from last week as a recent example).

Which challenges did you face in providing your first peer review? How did you approach these challenges?

Receiving review comments also presents challenges. Your two reviews are presented in entirely different formats; I use margins in Word Comment, and your peer provides feedback in paragraph form. Your reviewers also focused on different areas. Class members focused only on content, organization and format. My review included specific notes on grammar/mechanics and style, in addition to the areas reviewed by your peers.

Did you find the reviews to be helpful? Relate at least one specific area that the reviews helped you to address. If you did not find the reviews to be helpful, please let us know how we could improve the process.

The one challenge I faced when providing the first peer review was to make sure that the criticism and information I was offering was coming off in a positive direction. I wanted to keep my review mainly on the format of the paper and not so much grammar and spelling. I felt that the format of this memo was very important because it allows the reader to easily flow through the document.

I found the reviews to be helpful; one example from my peer review was to include a subheading for each paragraph, so that the reader can quickly move from section to section and quickly identify what they are looking for. After looking over the review I found that the information I received really helped made my document much stronger and concise.