Peer Review Reflection
Our first draft was really rough, so I was expecting to hear a lot more critical feedback during peer review. One of the main things we discussed in class was basically just cleaning up the page. For example, we had copied some quotes from our brochure that we were intending to incorporate into the news release and they were left as is at the bottom of the page. During revisions, we separated the quotes into existing paragraphs and overall tried to blend them more seamlessly into the document. Not only does this look better because the quotes were originally formatted much differently than the text around them, but it also keeps the news release from sounding too much like an advertisement. Other than that, after peer review, we spent a lot of time making the overall wording more clear and concise by removing redundancies and unnecessary phrases. This really helped to make the document look and sound more professional because our first draft had some pretty long blocks of text with a decent amount of fluff. Also, in doing this, we were able to shorten our news release just enough so we could spruce up our contact information at the very bottom.
Role Narrative
I’d say I primarily acted as an editor for this project. I did compose one paragraph for the rough draft, which in all honesty isn’t a lot, but I spent a lot of time after peer review trying to make the document look and sound as professional as possible to make up for my initial contribution. I focused a decent amount of my attention on cutting things out that were repetitive and rewording sections that sounded clunky. We definitely had some overlap in terms of the content in each paragraph and there were some pretty long sentences that were unnecessarily wordy, which I tried to fix with the help of my groupmates. Some edits that I made on my own were reworking the quotes as well as the contact information at the bottom, which are some of the more dramatic edits for the final product. Incorporating the quotes was definitely a necessary edit, but I thought reformatting the contact information would add something extra to make our news release stand out and I think it turned out pretty nice when I was finished with it.
