It was great to read someone else’s writing and see what kinds of communities they wanted to compare. This was my first time doing a peer-review through Canvas only. I try to think of remote learning as different instead of more difficult, so this was different. I liked that it was anonymous but I felt using Canvas was also limiting in some ways. It difficult to offer suggestions about the order/logic of a paragraph or sentence because I wasn’t with the author and I couldn’t mark a physical copy. When I felt something didn’t apply to the topic or I had a question about why something was included I had to interpret their purpose. The anonymity was nice because this way it really wasn’t personal, although I’m sure that’s not how a real peer review works.
While I was reading and giving feedback I did notice some things that I felt I could apply to my own paper. In my assigned papers I had one with a clear research question and one without. I thought the paper with the research question stated was more clear and more focused than the paper without one. The paper lacking a research question was not a bad paper but it was focused too broadly, meaning the proposed research was tied to too many ideas. If the research question had been included I think the author and I would have been able to understand the rest of the paper better. I haven’t written a research proposal before, so prior to the peer review part of this assignment I didn’t state a research question. After reading my peer-reviews I decided to include one despite how it looked and I think my paper became more focused.
