musings

Hi all,

I decided that I would start to journal here on the blog and I hope that all of you will feel free to do the same. Also, please continue to feel free to post and respond, if you wish!

My latest readings for my coursework are about the importance of peer reviews. It's an idea that is often foreign to many learners and it is a relatively new technique overall, having become popular here only since the seventies and eighties.

It's really important for teachers to guide their students to understand why peer reviews are important. One of the main reasons is to elicit from writers the notion that what they have read is meant for an audience, and not just for oneself! When we begin free writing on any topic, we are mostly writing for ourselves, but eventually we need to shape our writing for others to read besides ourselves!

Here are some other reasons why peer reviewing is valuable: through other people's mistakes, we often notice our own; by reading another's work, we can appreciate various writing styles and very importantly, readers and writers become a part of an academic community. Also, in the U.S., collaboration is very highly valued, so if you get an early start at working collaboratively with your peers in the classroom, you will find it easy to do so in a university or professional setting.

I will be giving everyone guidelines for these peer reviews, so you will know what to look for when you read your classmate's work.

More later, d