Learning Outcome 4: Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process.

When I first started writing papers, I believed that editing would be the teacher completely restructuring my paper and me having to just write down what she said. I believed that the edits would completely take over my paper and not sound like me at all. Now that I have been writing papers for years, I know that editing is used to help me better myself and my writing. It also allows me to see the small technical errors I have made while writing a paper that I have possibly been working on for too long. As Nancy Sommers states in Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers (1980), “Such blindness, as I discovered with student writers, is the inability to “see” revision as a process: the inability to “re-view” their work again, as it were, with different eyes…”. She recognizes that students fail to see their own errors after working on their own papers for a prolonged amount of time. 

While participating in peer editing, Courtney and Meghan told me that my problems were very small technical errors. Meghan mentioned that I switched between writing out the actual number and spelling them out and I should most likely follow the rule of spelling out numbers 10 and above. Courtney noted that some of my signal phrases were a bit clunky and I should find a way to make them more digestible. Overall, they said that everything else was good and I should watch out for small errors. 

For Meghan’s paper I advised that she should probably work on not having so many simple sentences because they begin to look like filler, however, her paper still managed to flow nicely. For Courtney’s paper, she also only had small technical issues. She was missing a few commas and I thought that she should work on using synonyms in her paper that did not sound so out of place in the writing.