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Paxton Retchless

Mr. Ventura

ENG 1540

19 October 2020

Peer Review Reflection

For English class, a paper I wrote was reviewed by two peer reviewers. Overall, I did not

receive a lot of suggestions. I know some people do not want to come off as rude or critical, but I

prefer when I receive a lot of suggestions, even if they are minor, so I can make my paper as

good as possible. The first of my peer reviewers only left one suggestion. They stated the aspects

of my paper that I did well, but did not have many suggestions to make it better. The single

suggestion was to remove the word “that” in my thesis statement, which I agreed with. In order

to still be able to utilize the rest of the peer review, I looked at what they said I did well to make

sure I hit all the major components of the essay. Based on their peer review, I addressed all of the

major aspects of the essay. The second peer reviewer had a slightly different opinion and

believed I did not have a clear thesis statement. I believe I did have a clear thesis statement, as

did the first peer reviewer, but a thesis statement should be able to be clear to everyone, so I

tweaked it a little bit anyways. The second peer reviewer stated that I should remove the sources

I included on the third page of the essay. I understand her reasoning and thought process because

the specific research is not supposed to be included until the actual research paper, but I kept the

information in. The reason I kept the information in is because the process sheet said to include

“major players” that made the topic debatable. The two contrasting pieces of information were

intended to act as those “major players” and show that the topic is debatable. The last criticism
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from the second peer reviewer was I had a few minor egregious errors. They did not say what

type of egregious errors they were or where they were in my paper, so I could not fix exactly

what they was referring to, but I thoroughly looked through my paper for any egregious errors I

may have made and tried to fix them. Since I did not receive a lot of suggestions, this will not

significantly change how I write in the future, but I will try to make my thesis statements very

clear and will be extra cautious of egregious errors moving forward.