Week 7: Reviewing and being Reviewed (Ahh!!)

Hello Everyone,

Luana here, checking in at Week 7, meaning we are officially into the second half of the semester!! This internship has moved very quickly, and I can't believe we are already this far. Last week our Draft Proposals were due, and I remember thinking that the hardest part, physically getting the words onto paper, was finished....... I think I may have been wrong. 

Now that we are at the process of peer review I am realising that having someone analyse my work is both a little bit terrifying and exciting.

Terrifying because obviously it is hard to hear something negative about your own work, especially when it is a part of a project that you have been working on for 6 weeks and feel attached to (I am feeling major empathy for academics who have much more investment in a topic).

Exciting because I am hoping that having new minds review my writing will be a great way to highlight how it could be better, in ways that I never would have thought of. I think a great summary of this is a comment made by one of the students in the Peer Review video we watched in our Workshop. That she could spend hours and hours on her essay and never find the way to improve it that her classmate could point out from reading it once.

So, even though I may not like hearing it at first, I am keen to get feedback on my work and can’t wait to put the suggestions into action when I get them. This leads me to my second big issue; how do I give good feedback? I can’t expect it from my classmates if I can’t give it back in return.

When we discussed previous feedback we had received during our Week 7 workshop, it seemed that most people had received a lot of bad feedback from Peers and Tutors alike. This ranged from being told a piece of work was good, but not explaining how it could improve, being told it was bad but not highlighting the positive parts of the work, having contradicting feedback throughout etc. The list goes on. These are all things that seem obvious not to do, but I have the feeling that in practice it can be difficult to ensure you are offering constructive, helpful criticism that is balanced.

For example, when we practiced peer review on proposals from students last year, I found that if lots of technical terms were used or a paragraph was confusing, I would subconsciously skim over it. Potentially this is a bad habit from years at uni reading papers about topics I’m only just becoming familiar with and assuming the author must know what they are talking about. Regardless of where it came from, this is not a good habit for peer review!

Therefore, I have made myself a ‘Peer Review Guide’ and I thought I would share it here incase it would help any of you

1.    After each paragraph, ask myself ‘What did that tell me?’. This is to combat my skim reading problem. If I read every paragraph trying to understand its purpose, I should be able to tell when it achieves explaining this purpose to me.

2.    If I understood the purpose of a paragraph, let them know they did a good job!

3.    If I don’t understand what the purpose of a paragraph was, why was that? Did it use difficult language that wasn’t explained? Did the sentences not make sense in the order they were written? Did the purpose of the paragraph seem to change half way? Etc.

4.    Do all of these paragraphs make sense in this order? I like to picture a story board in my head i.e. Does it make sense and provide more understanding to have a particular part of the story earlier?

5.    After reading this proposal, could I explain why the study is interesting and important to someone else?

I would love to hear if any of you guys have tips as to how you are going to approach peer review. Now that I am excited to get helpful feedback, I’d love to also be able to provide it!

Good luck reviewing and being reviewed guys (and if you get my proposal be kind 😉)

Luana x