THE REVIEW PROCESS
This analysis of a YouTube Commercial in relation to its use of Ancient Rhetorical styles has been a good project to work on. I found the peer review process stressful, although it has been a useful and effective tool for improving my essay.
The online tools used for completing this peer review included our class WordPress website, our EMU Canvas LMS class accounts, our EMU Gmail accounts, and the Google Docs app. I had used Google Docs for similar projects in the past and find it a very useful and easy tool for collaborating with others on one document. Although two of my teammates didn’t remember or didn’t know how to set their documents so that I could edit them, I sent a quick email using our Canvas Inbox tool which has both of their email addresses already loaded and it was taken care of.
The stressful part of it was that when I figured out how I could complete the review before one of my partners changed the permission setting, I think I ended up making her feel that I was “tattling” on her because I let the professor know what I was doing and sent him the link to the copied document I was going to review. The email she sent me seemed very defensive, explaining why she hadn’t responded right away. It was completely unnecessary because I knew she may not even get the email and was just troubleshooting so I could review it for her before class. Anyway, I talked to her about it in class and assured her that wasn’t my intention and she seemed fine so I guess I was stressing about nothing.
The stressful part of the peer review process (not just this one but all of them that I’ve done in the past) is that I am a proofreader, and I have also been a voracious reader my entire life. At my age, I have definite opinions about the effectiveness of what I read that I would have been too unsure of myself to mention when I was the age of most of my classmates. When you put those two things together, I am always worried I’m going to offend the writer of any paper I review. It’s happened in the past and really made a group writing project for one class very uncomfortable to finish and affected the final outcome.
I don’t want to blow these kids out of the water before they ever have a chance to try using their writing degree, so to alleviate this effect somewhat, I have started informing people at the very beginning of a paper not to freak out, that all comments and edits are reversible, and if they don’t like what I did, they can just reject it all. I’m not sure that’s the best solution, but I figure it’s better to tell them what I think and let them decide than to not say anything and always wonder if I didn’t do my best job reviewing.
THE REVIEW TOOLS USED
The use of Canvas for doing the team formations and the assignments to review worked smoothly but it was a little awkward getting started because clicking on the link to start reviewing the assignment directed us to the student’s entry on the Canvas discussion page where they posted the link to their paper on Google Docs. However, the document itself wasn’t in the system, which meant that in order for the system to know we had done any review, we had to go back to the Canvas invitation after doing the review on Google Docs, and then we had to enter anything in the comment box so Canvas would think that we had done some review. It’s possible that this was understood by others and it was just me. It wasn’t a big problem, though; it took a few minutes to figure it out and was just a bit confusing, being unsure what to do for a minute. In the future, that may be something that students should be told about to alleviate any confusion, although if I just missed it or didn’t understand it was like that, it doesn’t really matter.
THE REVIEW SURVEYS
The surveys that we completed through Google Forms were great; it worked beautifully. I think I would have liked to have had a box for open comments about something, rather than boxes for answering specific questions only, but it was fine. It seems like there was one or two of the questions that included two different topics and my answer was high on one of them and low on another, so that was difficult to decide what to do. I would definitely make sure all questions with a range for the answer style only asked one question.
REVISION PLANS
I think all three reviewers of my essay were very helpful and gave me some really good advice. I plan to take Katie’s suggestion to use my thesis statement to form the rest of my paper, and I plan to take the suggestions of them all and turn my table of all the figures and tropes into paragraphs. Beth and Rachel suggested joining some paragraphs that I plan to adopt, and Beth pointed out that my long list of style ornaments in the commercial could bore my audience if I discuss each of them individually so I will only do about half or join some of them so the list isn’t so long.
Beth made suggestions for in-text citations that I missed and that is another thing I will take care of. There are still a few questions I have for my professor that I will see if I can get answers from him when he reviews the Google doc.
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