I have only had experience with peer review once. It was the Spring semester of 2009. I was apprehensive about sharing my work with people in my class that I barley even knew. It was awkward at first when we were paired into groups of three and asked to exchange essays. It was kind of like handing over something personal, like an embarrassing baby picture, and hoping that no one would think it was dumb.
Bigger than the problem of sharing my own work was looking at someone elses and giving an opinion on it. What if I thought the work was terrible and needed a lot of work? How do you nicely put that the essay, this personal thing that they allowed me to look at and review, is complete rubbish? I would never want to make anyone feel bad about what they wrote.
I don’t know if there is a nice way to put somthing so harsh. So I would try and work around the garbage and pick out the good things and give praise for what is right, not critisize for what is wrong. Along the way I would try and guide them twords better sentence structure and so on.
An ideal response to my writing would be a brutally honest one. If my thesis is weak my adjectives are boring and over used and my grammar is atrocious, I want to know. I have problems picking up subtle hints and hidden messages, if it’s not straight to the meat, I more than likely will not get it (it’s a blessing and a curse).
That being said I know that not everybody feels the same way. I think most people just want their work to be respected and well liked by anyone who reads it.
