We were assigned someone else's paper for peer review, after weeks of working on my paper, I had what I thought was a decent paper, even for a rough draft, so when I submitted mine to the professor for her review and for peer review I thought, "OK, maybe I'll get an interesting paper in return." Wishful thinking.
What I got was a paper that was poorly written, poorly formatted, and not even what the assignment asked for. The paper has to do with homosexuality (and I am a homosexual--bet she didn't see that coming when she was thinking about peer review) But the author of the paper does not take a stand, out right tells her readers to decide for themselves (our whole assignment was to research a hypothesis and prove our point...with valid and sound arguments--HELLO). But I am not pissed about that part, so much as I am pissed because I feel bad for the student who wrote it. Not only does she not understand APA format at all, nor the coherent transition from paragraph to paragraph, but also doesn't have a clue of how disorganized and confusing what she's written is.
So as I am preparing for my assignment to review her assignment I think back to the basics of writing. What a sentence is, how to transistion from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, how to pull it all together, and how to use spell check along with Word's grammar check...Several mistakes are blatant spelling errors, grammatical errors, formatting errors, and problems with transition (did already mention that, only about ten times already I know). SHe has homosexuality spelled "hosexuality"--my 15 year old cracked up when she read that, and has now found a new word...but she asked me, "Mom, doesn't it bother you that she thinks it as simple as men wanting to be women and women wanting to be men?" I told her no, that didn't bother me, what bothered me is that this woman is in college and cannot write a simple paragraph without major subject verb agreement problems, and that she thinks she has a decent paper. What bothers me more is that I can help her, and will try to, but will she listen?
As hard as it is to be unbiased when reading her paper, I can achieve that, but what I cannot stop doing is feeling sorry for her. In the back of my mind I keep thinking about all the work she put into her paper, and how she must have saw all the red and green lines in Word when she was writing...did it not register? So I am using trackchanges and the appendix we're supposed to use for our peer review to help her with her paper. One way or the other I will do the very best I can to help her see the potential in her paper, and help correct the mistakes, no matter how many there are, but what I will not do is write her paper for her.
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