Tuesday, February 20, 2007

reviewing major figures in my field

I took College Writing I last semester, and we also used the peer review process. I feel that this process is extremely beneficial for my writing, if I have decent peer reviewers. Last semester, I had a peer reviewer that read my paper, looked at me, and said "Good." This upset me because I had read, re-read, and marked every detail problem with his paper. But, every other time I have used the peer review process my paper generally got better. When I look over other's papers I like to write on the paper all my editing changes, and my remarks. Then I like to explain what I meant by all the marks that I made. Last semester, my teacher also gave us a good idea to use when looking at other's papers. Reading the paper backwards, sentence by sentence, it definitely helps to pick up errors that one would not have noticed while reading it beginning to end. When the paper is read backwards it is out of order and the ideas are jumbled, but the grammar errors seem to jump right out at you. When I edited Tim's paper, I first read it through before I made any remarks or changes. I then started to read it backwards, to first pick up any grammar errors, so that they would not confuse me when I read for content. He wrote about The Crusades, and when writing a formal paper you must stay in the same tense. I made sure that every verb was in the past tense, because that is the tense he chose to use 70% of the time. Also, when using "The Crusades," he chose to capitalize both The and Crusades, most of the time. It really does not matter whether you capitalize the or not, I just told him to be consistent. I do not know if it is grammatical or just my style, but some of his sentences seemed to be out of order. When he wrote and read the paper, it made sense to him because he knew what he was writing about. I, on the other hand, know little to nothing about The Crusades. Therefore whenever a sentence seemed to be out of order, whether it be grammatically or style wise, I would re-write the sentence in the order I believed to be correct. I love to edit other's papers. I seem to be better at grammar while editing other's papers, and worse at it when writing and editing my own. And for my paper, I received many comments. The topic I covered was the Enron scandal, including Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and The Arthur Anderson Accounting Firm. What the top executives did was so confusing, the stockholders, the workers at Enron, and the judges in the trial did not even understand it. If someone has no knowledge of business, my paper may become entirely difficult to read and understand. If the reader has not taken any type of business class, they would have no basic knowledge of simple business terms. I tried to basically dumb it down, so that one who reads it could almost understand what had happened. Tim still had difficulty understanding the scandal, and exactly what I was writing about. I thought that it had been dumbed down enough, so that all the business terms were explained to someone who would not know what they had meant. When I say dumbed down, I do not mean that the reader is not intelligent, I just mean that they are ignorant to basic business understanding. So basically, there were a few basic grammar errors, but the main fix for me was that the content was too difficult to understand. Also, when I wrote it, I had difficulty with the page restrictions. It became extremely difficult to describe the Enron scandal in two pages. Not only did I have to describe the scandal, but I had to explain anything about business that an ignorant reader would not understand. Maybe, instead of describing all the acts that the guys at Enron pulled, I could have only described one, and how each person had a hand in it.

No comments: