Peer Review Recap Part 2

As I've mentioned before, I think peer review is an invaluable strategy to improve a piece of writing. As I noticed in the first peer-review, there are a lot of times when a writer needs to hear an objective voice. The writer can never completely remove himself from his writing. It follows that blind spots are going to be inevitable. I think it is immeasurably helpful to have my peers point out what is unclear or jarring, because a lot of the time, I just won't be able to see it. The easiest way to find the discrepancies between what's in my head and what's on the page is by getting objective feedback from other writers.

I noticed another interesting aspect of peer-review this time around. While I like getting comments from others, I think making comments on others' writing benefits my own. When I review others' papers, my own critical eye gets some practice. If I notice a problem or a difficulty in another's paper, I feel like I am better at noticing and diagnosing my own problems and difficulties. So, peer-review seems to be beneficial all around.

I don't have a preference for either google docs or wetpaint. They seemed pretty similar to me. I felt that, practically, I did pretty much the same thing with google docs as I did with wetpaint. I think I liked this peer-review better, but I only because we all have some more practice at it, not because the computer program is any better. I remember being frustrated with the first peer-review, because I had to go back through my paper and determine what was mine and what was a change someone else made. This time around, I think people caught on to using the different color fonts and this made things easier for me.

The only other thing that popped out at me in regard to this peer-review was an annoying aspect of wetpaint. When I uploaded my paper, my italics and underlines (I don't think "underlines" is a real word) disappeared. My paragraph indents had something weird going on too. I forgot to re-underline some of the words in my paper and this led to some confusion with the peer-review. This brings to mind one of my biggest beefs with high technology--I wouldn't mind using it so much if it actually worked. I think this should be the first requirement of new technology. It makes very little sense to me to replace an existing technology that works well, with a new, flashy technology that works poorly or not at all. I would prefer a method of peer-review that deals with the paper I actually wrote, as opposed to the paper that has been jumbled by cyberspace.