I have come a long way with personal growth on peer review this semester. I started off with little to no experience with peer review in the classroom and came out of this course feeling confident in my skills. In the first picture below is a screenshot of one of my first peer reviewed essays. My comments include things like, “with” instead of “in”, “end sentence here”, “get rid of the and”, and “start the sentence with “instead”. My comments were overwhelmed with suggesting different words, and correcting grammar. I quickly found through conversation in the classroom that this was not the best way to go about peer review. While surface level comments are helpful, I learned in this class that detailed, deeper level thinking comments are what peer review is all about. As this class progressed so did my skills in peer review. As seen in the second picture (project 3 peer review) that I attached, my comments are more in depth and geared toward providing feedback in a way that is more thoughtful than my comments in earlier work. One of the comments included in the second picture reads, “I really like the end of this paragraph, you explain Anderson’s quote well while adding personal things about your life that really add to the depth of your writing”. This example shows my improved skills in peer review because even though this comment is basically just saying that I like what she did, I explain it in a way that ties into things we have discussed in class. To add to this, I have learned that if you slack off on the homework peer review portion, then it makes it a lot more challenging to discuss with your peers in person about their work. I know this from personal experience because in the first peer review group that I was in with Caira, Derek, and Ian (peer review in first picture below) I commented on things that are hard to discuss for more than a few seconds. You can’t have an academic, deep conversation over a spelling or grammar mistake. To be successful in these in-person peer review groups, engaging comments are vital. I believe engaging comments to be anything to the extent of deeper level thinking questions, giving your own opinion on a topic, disagreeing, or agreeing with an idea and explaining why, or sharing insight about what you think they could add to their writing to help advance it.