Thlog 3: Audience and Peer Reviewing

After finishing up my first writing project, I reflected on my work and tried to think of the most important thing I had learned from it. I finally concluded that the single biggest thing I took away from this project was how much audience influences a genre. Between all three of my pasta recipes, most of the variation was because of the different audiences. The audiences had an impact on how the recipe was formatted, worded, etc. As Losh and Alexander said, everything you write is “influenced by what you know about the audience’s expectations” (7). Audience is crucial to writing a genre because certain rhetorical strategies work better with specific groups of people. Understanding who you’re writing to and their expectations can better help you achieve your goals because you can write in a way that you know will elicit a desired response.

Besides learning about audience, I gained valuable knowledge on how to peer review an essay. The reading “Responding to Other Student’s Writing” by Richard Straub really helped me because in the past I have been overly critical when grading other student’s essays and not given enough support or positive feedback. The reading told me not to sound like a “teacher” or “judge” (19). I really let those words sink in and resonate through my mind when we did the peer editing in class. I tried to ask questions and be positive but also offer advice. I gave reasoning for everything that I wrote so that the actual concept would make sense to the reader and he could understand why it should be fixed. Responding to my classmate’s essays also gave me a better understanding of what we were learning and gave me some ideas about what I could fix on my own paper.