In class recently, we have been talking about and performing paper workshopping. Peer editing is used for the soul purpose of having readers and writers take responsibility for the content, organization, and purpose of the essay. With each draft comes a new workshopping session, and with that a new draft to be created. The drafts are supposed to improve after each edit because not only is the writer trying to improve the written piece, but so should the people doing the editing. Some important things to remember when peer editing are bringing problems to the writers attention, always read the paper at least twice, be honest, and be specific. Teachers think so highly of peer editing but it comes with some pros and cons.
Here are some pros of workshopping if it is done correctly. Students may perform better knowing that their papers are being read by other students just like them who actually exercise a lot of influence on who to impress with their essay. It also allows a writer to hear many different opinions and options for their work that may help make the final essay better than the author could have without help. Sometime while writing, you miss mistakes and having others read it over a few times will help you pick up those errors and correct them. Not only does workshopping fix the mistakes you make, but it can also reinforce any good ideas or parts of the paper you have.
On the other hand, here are some cons. Some people in peer groups do not put too much effort into actually trying to help the writer improve his or her paper. Maybe they are afraid of being too harsh or honest, or maybe because they are lazy. Maybe the editors are not very good at writing themselves and are afraid of giving false help. In my opinion, a teachers help would be a little more efficient than having students around my age proof read my paper, no offense to any of you!
So here is my question to the class. Do you find peer editing/ workshopping to be helpful or a waste of time? Why? And would you rather have a teacher edit your paper or students just like you?
This is a great topic, mostly because we are al experiencing it right now as we right these memoir papers. I agree that there are many pros and cons to this, which makes this question really hard to answer. I do like the peer editing because I like reading other people’s work and I get a lot of ideas just from their writing style that I can use in my paper. If the teacher had a mock paper up, then I don’t think I’d really need to peer editing as much, but I would still want to use it. But then there comes the problem that was mentioned. Sometimes you don’t really give good advice and sometimes you don’t receive very good advice. It is pretty much hit and miss with peers. However if I did have to pick either peer review of teacher review, I would definitely pick a teacher review. There are many reasons for this, some of them being that I feel like a teacher can give you more detailed and helpful advice and constructive criticism. They are teachers for a reason: they are experts in their field; that means that they know what they’re doing. So why wouldn’t you want the person who knows the most about what they’re doing to look over your paper? But the most important reason why I would rather have a teacher look over my paper is for a very simple reason: they gave the assignment. I know personally that I have done this memoir paper wrong twice now and I’ve had to start over from scratch, because it’s a confusing assignment. Luckily the teacher is the one who assigned it and more importantly, they are the one grading it. So obviously, you want to please them more than your peers, whose opinion really doesn’t affect your grade all that much. So, personally I would much rather have my teacher look over the paper. I felt more prepared for this paper when we went for an individual appointment then in our workshop groups.
ReplyDeleteI am definitely torn about this topic. I do like peer editing for the reasons that you have stated. I is good to have someone give you feedback and help you improve your writing. There are many errors that the writer themselves will miss because sometimes after writing and reading so much you just become oblivious to some of your own mistakes, at least for me. But i also feel like peer editing is not taken very seriously for some people. Many students just skim and give basic feedback so they do not get in trouble with their teacher. That has been my experience in the past. Also students might be shy and not wanting to put down their peer's work that they do not give all the feedback that they should. For these reasons i am glad we have conferences with our teachers. So we get feedback from our peers but our teacher can help us fix whatever was missed by the peer editor.
ReplyDeleteI agree with many of the pros and cons of peer editing and workshopping that you mention in your blog. Sometimes it is much more comfortable for students to have their work edited by their peers, although sometimes it has the opposite effect. If done thoughtfully and correctly, I think peer workshopping can be very beneficial. However, I do not think it is done right most of the time. Most students know that they have to have their papers peer edited and complete peer editing on other’s papers to get a complete grade for their paper, therefore they skim the papers making remarks such as, “interesting!” or “expand here!” or “good idea!” without reading thoughtfully and carefully. I am guilty of doing so myself. Sometimes it is much better to have a teacher edit your paper, unless your peers truly care about improving your work.
ReplyDeleteI believe peer editing is as helpful as the people around you. If your peers do try to help it can be very useful by giving multiple views and ways to improve. If not it is basically a huge waste of time. I personally would rather have a teacher edit mine. Not only are they more qualified but they probably have a better idea of if you are headed in the right direction.
ReplyDeleteI personally like work shopping, but sometimes if goes both ways of love and hate. Usually when some other classmate workshops my paper I get good feedback. I like to know what peers that I can relate to think about what I’ve written. It’s not really important to me for them to correct the grammar, but more of their opinion on the material. It also can be a pain in the butt. Printing out multiple copies then having one of your group members write absolutely nothing on it and just say “it was good, I liked it”, is a waste of paper and time. If people aren’t lazy then the work shopping is a great idea. I know I’m guilty of it once or twice because some days you’re just feeling lazy and don’t want to do anything in class.
ReplyDeleteTeacher editing is a plus because their giving you their feedback and obviously you want to make the changes because they’re the ones grading your paper. Overall I feel like if taken advantage of workshop will definitely improve your writing and help you in the long run.
I have mixed thoughts about peer editing/workshopping. I don't really think it works and is kind of a waste of time. I feel this way because because when I edit a fellow classmates paper I have no idea what to look for. It seems like every thing is fine with the paper. And when we have to write comments my mind literally goes blank because I have no idea what to say besides "Ooo I really like this." I would rather have a teacher edit my paper because the teacher knows what he or she is doing. They know what's right and what's wrong. Yeah the teacher may be a little more harsh on the paper than a classmate but I rather have harshness than some B.S. comment.
ReplyDeletei find that a good peer edit group can be very beneficial to the overall greatness of my paper, but when i get a group that is more worried about socializing i find that my paper may suffer a little bit. i find that i take peer editing with a grain of salt. it is hard for me to take criticism especially from a peer.i would much rather just have a teacher or parent edit my paper
ReplyDeleteI think peer editing can be really helpful when done right by peers. If the peers take it seriously and have different strengths from yourself, then it is helpful. In my writing, I don't always convey ideas clearly because I assume the reader knows more than what I let on or I leave information out that is important and so on. Most of the time, I fail to realize that information that isn't important to me, is important to the audience.
ReplyDeleteWhich do I prefer over the other? I like a combination of the two. The teacher may not always see your work in your point of view like a fellow peer would. I like having input from both a teacher and a peer.
At times I believe that having a student read our paper is more beneficial for the person that is reading than the person that they are reading it for. For example if I read another students paper and think "Wow, this makes no sense with the previous paragraph" than I automatically go get my paper and make sure mine make sense. Some teachers grading scales are tough, they already have their college degrees and they expect us to write, analyze and read at the level in which they do.
ReplyDeleteI am not a fan of peer editing. I always feel like nothing in my paper ever get corrected, even my simple grammar mistakes. I also feel it is hard to work with your own peers and give and receive advice from them. In my past experiences and what I feel today, I prefer for a more experienced person to edit my papers like a teacher.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is good to get input on your paper from other students who are writing the same paper as you are. I like getting a lot of ideas from peer review so that I have plenty of ways that I can go with my paper. Plus getting to read my classmates papers gives me a chance to compare my paper to theirs. However, it is probably better to have the teacher review your paper since they are the ones that grade it. They can definitely give you the best advice on what you should or should not do to your paper.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is good and bad results from peer editing. I don't like it because you are putting a peer who may not care how you do, in a position of responsibility with your work. The teacher can be trusted because it is their job to help you, but another student doesn't really have any incentive to give you meaningful advice, unless there one of the few college students enrolled to learn as apposed to showing up for the credit towards a diploma. When students take the time to give a genuine response to a paper, I believe that peer editing can be very successful.
ReplyDeleteLooking at the last question, I would prefer a combination of both, which is why peer editing is helpful. But in answering that, I contradict my answer of the first question: Peer editing is a waste of time. Most of the experience that I have had in my peer editing groups can be summed up in the cons stated in this post. My work is either said to be perfectly fine (which always turns out to be false according to my teacher), or my group members speak of friends and plans for the weekend. Though I have heard many good things that others have experienced, I cannot say that I have a valid stand on the helpfulness of peer editing.
ReplyDeleteI think there are good and bad results for workshopping. I don't necessarily agree with having a student try and fix your paper, when some lack in experience. Also, things tend to get a little personal whether you make it personal or not. Most of the results you receive are positive encouraging feedback. While this can be a good thing, the positive feedback comes from not wanting to tell the other person to have hurt feelings. The good thing about workshopping is that it gives you the opportunity to constructively look at a piece of writing, which helps you see mistakes in your own writing.
ReplyDeletePeer editing helps me in a different angle. If we simply had a due date for the essay, I would probably wait until the last minute to try and write the whole thing. However, the workshops allow me to start earlier and work on my essay without procrastinating. Because of this I think they are a good use of class time and important to the writing of our essays.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion student workshops couldn't hurt. I know from my own experience student workshops have forced me to put more effort into my rough drafts. By doing workshops I am able to get a head start on my papers, preventing me from procrastinating up until the due date. In addition, even if the students that read your paper don't put very much effort into their feedback, any feedback on a paper helps. As for the last question, I would absolutely rather have a teacher read over my paper than a student. Students may better understand where you are coming from when you try to get a point across, but a teacher certainly has more experience in reading over papers, and in the end they will be the one grading it.
ReplyDeleteStudent workshops are great when you have students that are willing to actually workshop your paper. I've yet to have a bad experience with having a student edit my paper. I prefer to let the students workshop the first two drafts and then have the teacher edit them once before the final draft, but that isn't how we are workshopping this paper unfortunately. A professor doesn't really have time to edit 75 papers every week, so having our professor look over it once is adequate.
ReplyDeleteI am not a fan of student workshops. Some people do not want to take the time and effort to actually read your work. It is stressful when you put personal things in a paper, and then someone does not even bother to read it. I have mixed emotions about peer workshops but none of them are really positive.
ReplyDeleteI find peer editing useful for some situations. Students sometimes can relate more to the topic than a teacher can therefore they can help you out a lot more with the topic. However, when it comes to the mechanics of a paper, I would rather have a teacher edit my paper. Teaches have been taught how to edit their student's paper and know just about everything when it come to this.
ReplyDeleteI find peer editing to be useful and helpful depending on who's doing it. If it's a student that is above average at English then it is indeed constructive because he or she might have ideas or corrections that benefit my paper. On the other hand, I've had experiences in high school when people that were editing my paper had no idea what they were doing. They weren't necessarily unintelligent, just English wasn't their strongest subject. Same goes for teachers. Some teachers in the past have been big fans of my writing style, while others were not too fond of it.
ReplyDeleteI personally think it is a waste of time. This is because most students are un prepared or just don't care. For example if we traded papers, a class later we are supposed to have read them and thought about it, but my whole group didn't read it thoroughly and or didn't care enough to make helpful comments. They only cared about their own. I would much rather have my teacher just make comments on it because it is their job to do and it doesn't really matter for the student.
ReplyDeleteI think it can be helpfull because you can hear opinions of different people. I also like when I have to read someone's paper because I feel like that can give me some more ideas on what to focus on in my paper.
ReplyDeleteI cannot stand peer editing. I prefer only the teacher to read my essays and provide their experience and expertise into the corrections. I am always of the advice I get from other students, unless they are a straight A student. I feel a lot more comfortable when the teacher tells me my essay is good than when a student does.
ReplyDeletePeer editing is very helpful to me. I've grown up taking constructive criticism so I think that helps me in my own way to learn. I honestly think that peer editing is one of the best ways for me to learn and make my paper better. Even if the person isnt always saying the right things sometimes they give me ideas and I can run with that. Peer editing helps me out tremendously.
ReplyDeleteI prefer the teacher to edit my paper because I am writing it for the teacher. Also, this paper we are currently writing is very personal and I would not want my classmates reading it (or not reading it). I think it is a broken system because every teacher has a specific opinion about how a paper should be written. Asking us to consult an outside source that has nothing to do with the teacher is a waste of time.
ReplyDeleteWe don't know enough as students to critique each others. After the first workshop, I noticed that neither the students grading my paper nor I had any idea what we were doing. Several things were obviously wrong with the construction of their essays and mine alike, but since I haven't had enough formal training in editing, I wasn't quite sure what to look for. I think workshopping can be beneficial on a very superficial level. If we just want to gage story captivation or the level of interest, workshopping can be very helpful. However, that doesn't require an entire session of "workshopping" that in the end doesn't amount to much. There's not much we can do though since editing does not come cheap. Honestly, I would rather a field trip to the writing center for them to critique my paper.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I think the teacher should review the essays instead of the students because we, at least I, don't put too much effort in reviewing others' essays. And that's because I don't have the knowledge to see all the mistakes a professor would see. I would probably recognize obvious grammar mistakes, but not the others. I think it is more beneficial to the student if the professor review our essays for mistakes.
ReplyDeleteI feel that workshopping is a great way to better our papers, but at the end of the day the teacher will have the most impact out of everybody. Students can try, but won't 100% have the corrections that a teacher would have had. The workshopping we do in class right now is great, except it is useless at the end of the day because the teacher doesn't have any input. The input we got from mrs.ahmed during the meetings was great, but she should be doing that all the time for workshopping in GENERAL to work.
ReplyDeleteI’m on the fence about peer editing, it can be done well and it can be done poorly. In my ENC1101 class, we would bring our drafts to class, sit in a group, read each other’s papers one at a time, write comments, and give feedback. Sounds fine but reading three, five page papers and making all the comments you want in less than fifty minutes is impossible. I never got helpful feedback because there simply wasn’t time. Taking the papers home to read and comment on them is much more realistic when asking for helpful comments. On the other hand, if you have peer editors who just don’t care then you’re pretty much SOL and wasting your time. Not a whole lot you can do there though. I always find it helpful to get a teacher’s opinion on an assignment because they know exactly what is necessary to make the grade.
ReplyDeleteI definitely have mixed thoughts about work shopping. I think that peer editing can actually be helpful when done right by the person proof reading your paper. I would much rather have my professor edit my paper, for the simple reason that he/she is the one grading it and I want their perspective on it. However, I also like to hear the opinions of my other classmates because they are the intended audience and they can give me ideas before I hand it in to the professor. I actually like the way we are doing workshops in this class because it gives us the best of both worlds by getting our professor and our classmate’s opinions. Furthermore, I believe taking home peers papers is a great way to actually sit down on our own time and really give feedback. In a matter of fifty minutes, I think it would be nearly impossible to give a good in depth edit of three other students’ papers. When I look over someone’s work, I like to point out every little thing because I would want a person to do that for me. Unfortunately, some people don't want to put in the time and effort to read someone else’s paper and you end up getting no useful feedback.
ReplyDeleteI find workshopping helpful only when the people reading my paper are taking the assignment seriously. So far, workshop in class has been pretty good. With our first assignment things have been a little harder to figure out but hopefully the later papers will allow us to really see if workshopping will be very beneficial. I like that both students and teachers read my paper. IT gives two insights to my work and a teacher is the one grading the paper so it is nice to know what the teacher thinks of your paper before the final draft is turned in.
ReplyDeleteBefore this year I was non-believer in workshopping. Last semester in ENC 1101 I had to workshop for every paper and overall it helped dramatically with my writing. For me being able to receive a variety of opinions does wonders for the overall quality of my paper. I would much rather my professor look over my work then fellow classmates simply because my grade comes down to my professors interpretation of my work not what my classmates think of it.
ReplyDeletePeer editing has been good and bad for me. I have had some people really put a lot of work into editing my paper and i can tell that they actually read it. But i have had others who just write "i liked this part" or "thats cool" and honestly that doesnt help me write my next draft. Yes, i enjoy the positive feedback but i would like some negative stuff too so i know what to fix. I like having peer editing, sometimes the people in your class can see what you have written in a different way than your professor. But I personally always get my paper editied by my professor before i turn in my final draft.
ReplyDeleteI find peer editing extremely helpful. When people peer review my work, I prefer them to be harsh and tell me everything they think might be wrong with my paper than just writing "good" on the margins which doesn't help at all. Sometimes it can be frustrating when people don't give you a lot of comments, but I also understand it is difficult to peer review. Over the years, I've gotten better at peer reviewing but sometimes I get really great papers, and I can barely write anything helpful on them. That makes me feel pretty useless, and I really try to avoid that, but overall peer review really does help. I don't mind if students or teachers are the ones who edit my papers, I guess it would make sense to choose a teacher, but since they don't always have a lot of time other students reviewing it is just fine. The system ENC 1101 and ENC 1102 use where you peer review each paper with students twice and your teacher once I think they've struck the perfect balance.
ReplyDeleteI have found that when you workshop in class and only have that time to work on the other's paper's you are not actually able to give them good feedback. I also see that sometimes workshop becomes a free period, one might just write a few things on his partner's paper then hand it back and sit there. This is not in anyway productive to the person editing and the person who is being edited. However I do think that the ability to take someone's paper home and look over it more thoroughly both the reader and writer are able to get better feedback. I also believe that a teacher should edit each of your papers once to ensure that they have what the teacher wants.
ReplyDelete