Finals Week- A Discussion on Peer Edits

During my final two essays of my English class; one on Britney Spears and the other on APA involvement in Guantanamo torture tactics, I found myself surprised. Everything seemed to flow easily, like something had finally clicked in my mind. Something that I’d been waiting for. My capacity for descriptive detail had melded with my ability to use information toward an overall point. In my mind I’d arrived at my goal! I was amazing, unstoppable! Then, it was time for peer editing.

This is my greatest flaw in writing and I will admit it; I both love and despise the whole peer editing process. Say you’re writing a paper on a topic that you’ve studied, and thus you know what you’re talking about. You don’t feel it necessary to describe certain things because sometimes you forget not everyone studied the same topic as you did. When reading a rough draft through, a person knows what they had on their mind, and thus are thoroughly impressed by their ability to “get into the head of your reader” and have them use their own knowledge to draw conclusions. This is not always the case for the peer editing your paper. They don’t always agree with you, or share the basic knowledge on your specific subject (more often than not you pick a subject you already have background in, because it’s simpler.) In the end of a peer edit session, I get mad at their edits and think that they have no idea what they’re talking about. Why am I under that impression? I read their paper, and needed to look at it objectively and find all the problems with it. To quote myself on one of my edits, “Less commas, more insight into what you’re talking about.”

You see; some people, with me included, get mean when they edit papers. Then, they expect that because they saw so many errors in the other person’s assignment the other editor will have nothing but great things to say! This is just a delusion that sets my up for horrible heartbreak. This is the way of the peer edit process. It makes enemies out of fellow students and it’s awful, but necessary to get all your kinks out. This is what needs the most work after this class. I need to be able to receive critique without either taking it personally, or getting angry and deciding that my editor was just full of it.