Peer Pressure

I had all but forgotten about peer reviews until this semester. They’re the type of memory that one can’t help but repress. The entire process was obviously designed by and for masochists. I’m sure that most professors are fed up with the depressing fact that the overwhelming majority of college students have the writing talent of Rebecca Black, but there’s no reason that I as a student should be reduced to reading their drivel. The idea is that the better writers are supposed to help out the worse ones, but this is no easy task.

Here’s how it goes-

Everybody exchanges their papers for the group to comment on. At least one (only one if you’re lucky) of these papers reads as if the writer had just pulled it out of a time capsule that they buried for themselves when they were seven.  Now, let’s assume that I want to help this individual. How do I go about this? Do I say, “This paper was really bad. You should really just start over. And I don’t mean the paper, I mean the eleventh grade,” and risk coming off too strong? Or do I try to sugar coat it and dance around my words and risk leaving them feeling that they already possess a shred of competence that they clearly do not?

I tend to stick to the smaller, padded comments in the interest of saving time. Of course, these comments are almost all met with excuses which undermine the entire purpose of doing a peer review in the first place. I’m not saying that I’m the be-all and end-all of writing, but much like Justice Potter Stewart to pornography I know crap when I see it.

 When you get past all of the technical aspects of writing (that very few good writers even get right in the first place) it becomes a very subjective business. I find the number of completely arbitrary rules that people adhere to in their writing to be... interesting. My personal favorite is the idea that one shouldn't include the word “I” in any manner of formal writing. It’s true that scholarly articles should be unbiased, but this is hardly a useful rule when writing a short paper that will never be read by anybody other than one professor and a small group of students. I wrote a paper about E-books earlier this semester that worked in a lot of my personal experience and opinion and another student critiqued me on breaking the “I rule”. I lied and told him that I “respectfully” disagreed and explained to him that my paper would be ungodly boring if I removed my voice from the work. 

In my most recent peer review group I had the great pleasure of having my paper edited by a girl who was clearly more optimistic about the revision process than I. Her comments in the margins quite possibly exceeded the length of the paper that I submitted. Her first comment was that I neglected to type my name on the document which was attached to a post under my name on a discussion board. I’m not saying that all of the comments were useless, but that was certainly a rough start. This type of comment really highlights another major problem with peer reviews- the fact that they’re graded. This forces students to try to correct things that might have never even been wrong.

Her final comment on my paper was that my conclusions came off “a bit bitter” which detracted from my “scholarly voice,” which read to me like I was erring on the side of being interesting. What would I even have to be bitter about?