Reaction to Peer Review

I think the peer review was extremely helpful in highlighting weaknesses throughout my essay. After writing an essay I tend to become blindsided to the errors that are in it. Without another person looking over my essay, I would not have been able to see my essay through another perspective. Peer review allowed me to see large scale systemic errors in my writing. I was able to see when I was summarizing the essays unnecessarily and when I needed more textual support. Essentially what I realized was that I spend too much time restating the arguments of the essays instead of actually presenting and setting up quotes and then analyzing them. I also learned of certain arguments and pieces of evidence to include in my essay. For example, I was told that I neglected the argument of demon programming that Johnson brought up and that it could be useful to include in my essay as support. My peers noticed how weak my essay was without the text in place to support my claims. I also realized that I completely forgot to include the names of the essays I was talking about in my introduction. My peers also made sure that I knew what parts of my essay were effective so I knew what parts to keep unchanged. This was especially helpful when I was analyzing the limits of the connections between the two essays. As a result, I know what parts of my analysis are strong and which are weak. In addition, my peer also picked up on a few grammatical errors that I missed. All in all, peer review provides a fresh way to look at writing that has become too familiar to my own eyes.