Although we were unable to do the larger paneled discussion, it was very interesting to do a smaller panel of three papers with two of my peers. In my group, I felt that the primary and secondary reviewers for each paper were in agreement over most of the questions we answered with respect to the proposals, but everyone had different details to bring to the table. Each person brought different elements of praise as well as constructive criticism and seeing how each of us saw very different things in each proposal, but still had a shared general view of them, made me reflect on how my proposal might be interpreted very differently depending on the reviewer. One of the main things that our paneled discussion highlighted for me is that often as a writer you make assumptions, albeit subconsciously, like what your audience might already know or what they do not know, and these impact how you write and what content you include. I definitely wonder how my own personal assumptions impacted the construction of my proposal and if it made it less or more accessible to my panel audience. Moving forward, I definitely want to spend more time doing revisions, or at least stepping away from my papers for a day or two and then coming back to them to see if I missed out on opportunities to clarify or present information in a different way. I think this will be really beneficial for me in all my writing, because I definitely have blinders on to some degree when I’ve been writing or doing research for a long time without stepping away and allowing for time to do some of the work. One of the huge downsides of procrastinating, is that you lose that extra time to do your own set of revisions, which I know can make a huge difference not only in the finished product but in how you learn about yourself as a writer. This review process also made me think more about the general peer review process which Dr. Massoni discussed in class, and how important it is for the peer review steps to occur since it is at that point that the most important work for revisioning occurs, rather than the review point of the editor, who is working more under the pressures of his publishers or potential audience.
