Peer Editing and the Tiny Bird that Flew

Peer Editing and the Tiny Bird that Flew

Douglas West

There are some people that are good at cooking food. I am a terrible cook and I cannot even add milk to cereal. On the flip side there are great consumers of food like the great American Joey Chestnut who can consume sixty two hot dogs in twelve minutes. I am a great consumer of food, not a creator. How does this apply to peer editing? I am a consumer of editing advice and terrible at creating good advice, if any at all. Whatever paper I read gets very little and poor advice. Whoever reads my paper is often overloaded with work because of the plethora of mistakes I make with grammar, spelling, word choice, and other such spelling mistakes. Now with this said I would like to thank my partner for all the great corrections he or she made to my paper anonymously on this blog without mentioning Megan’s name.

In regards to book, my editing style was pretty similar to how chapter ten describes the process. First, I read the entire essay and looked for any structure mistakes and fluency of the idea the paper was trying to get apart. Second, I read the essay a second time slowly looking for grammatical mistakes. That’s just about all that I do. I am a great reader but I am not a great editor.

The only difference was how relaxed and fun the environment was. Never met this person before and I’m nervous about how she is going to judge my paper. I am going to open up on this blog and tell you my deepest secret. There is nothing more in the world that I am more self-conscious about than my writing and ideas. There I said it. As she reads my paper I am as nervous as a mother bird watching her baby bird jump off a cliff for the first time to see if it can fly. Then my partner and I start to talk about each other papers. She loved my paper! She corrected a lot of my grammar mistakes which I greatly appreciated as well. The editing process does not have to be so formal and robot like. It takes away all of the fun in the paper. Giving a friend some positive supportive advice is all a paper needs to come alive with information and entertainment. Let your words jump off a cliff and see if your tiny ideas can fly. “Words are easy, like the wind”-William Shakespear.