That moment when you have to peer-edit your fellow students' papers.
I absolutely detest peer-editing.
Professor: "Well, I'm too lazy to edit the paper myself, so I'll just have my students do it for me! And make it a grade! That'll work!"
I always end up with the paper that is in dire need of help, or the grader who thinks that peer-editing means you have to be a writing Nazi and mark up the paper as much as possible because THAT must be what the professor is looking for.
I fail to see how either scenario is helpful.
My latest encounter with peer-editing involved my grading a paper for a girl who clearly did not put in the appropriate amount of energy.
The paper was atrocious. To be in grad school, you should have some level of writing already mastered and this paper did not demonstrate it at all. We're talking fragments and nonsense all over the place. And I'm not one of the grammar Nazis either. Many times, if the paper looks fine, I'll send it back with maybe a few comments, but I try not to overdo it.
This paper was different though. It was terrible.
On top of all that, I found that the writer had inserted an extra space at the beginning of every sentence. For a paper with an assigned length to it, that looks veeeeeery suggestive of cheating to me.
And so, I put in a comment.
"I first thought this was isolated incidences here and there, but I've now noticed that you've put an extra space between the beginning of every sentence. Is this to increase the paper length?"
I'm not stupid. I know just about every trick in the book when it comes to increasing the length of a paper. Increasing every period's size one point, an extra "Enter" at the end of every page, yada yada yada.
And so, that's what this looked like.
The writer emailed me back saying that I was unprofessional and that she "didn't appreciate my snarky comments".
Well, shoot.
I don't think I'm going to reply to that email, but I think I now have further ammunition against why I hate peer-editing.
Time to go for a hike.
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