Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision).

In high school, when reviewing a peer’s essay, we had always focused solely on localized edits, such as comma splices, capital letters, and punctuation. When I began the English Composition course, I was surprised to find that in college-level courses, the concentration was substantially placed on global edits. I wasn’t used to making suggestions to other students about changing their ideas or their paragraph structure. After becoming accustomed to this technique, I have developed the ability to achieve a balance between local and global revisions. For example, in the first peer review held in our class, I found it nearly impossible to point out a punctuation mark inside of quotations. I was thankful for the notes we were assigned to right in which I had the chance to point this out. This knack has transformed drastically over the course of this class. In the most recent peer review, I was able to suggest to my peers things such as ‘have you thought about placing your fourth paragraph as your second instead’ or ‘I think it would benefit your thesis to clarify what your major is’. However, if I do find a common localized error that appears more than once in a student’s free draft, I tend to point it out just in case.