Thlog #7

I’m almost positive that last week when I was writing my thlog I was discussing how we had just finished up writing project one, yet that isn’t exactly possible considering now we’ve finished up writing project two. This week I felt like we had a much more successful peer-editing “session” than that for the writing project before, largely due to allotting a greater amount of time. I found the exercise of peer-editing to be a bit more challenging than I had initially anticipated, despite leading to what I believed to be more beneficial results. Instead of one of my peers telling me “Hey, this sentence doesn’t really seem to fit here, nor does it seem to have a purpose” I instead got “Hey, what is the purpose of this sentence? What does it contribute to your paper?” This follows along with a statement that was made in class about the purpose of peer editing, and more specifically what it ought not to be. Peer editing is not revising someone’s paper—that is what a first, second, third, and so on draft are for (all written by the writer). Rather, peer-editing should be a source of getting writers to think about why they did what they did, and if the way they did it is the best possible way. One thing that I think may be helpful for future edits is to come to class with your draft highlighted according to the “highlighting” assignment that we have previously done, or for whoever is editing your paper to highlight it accordingly. Sometimes I think it can be nice to have a “fresh eye” look at your paper in this way as while to you it may seem that you have enough direct evidence, to your reader you may not.