Peer Reviews

I've never had a positive peer review experience before. They've always been a pain in the ass, for various reasons. Two experiences in particular come to mind:

When I was in high school, I had to have a peer review my paper on the Great Gatsby. The tragedy of this exercise lay not in its format but in that this was a subjective review. We weren't grading each other on grammar and flow of writing, but our own opinions (our teacher seemed to suffer from a lack of common sense, and as a consequence, so did we). Our discussion on the opinions of the book quickly became a heated argument. I think I could have made this experience better by trying to keep the conversation positive, but the exercise was such a bad idea from the start that even this seems a distant solution.

Now, let's talk about something more recent. I think that the number-one fear in peer reviews is that your partner for the review is either incompetent or not truly listening. Two years ago I wrote a research paper on the Mammoth, and had to have it peer-reviewed with a girl in the class. This experience was negative because my peer was not engaged or interested in the paper. She skimmed it, took breaks to talk to a friend or text on her phone, and gave me the most generic advice a writer can hear: "It's good, but you need to put more of your opinion in it." Naturally I hated her on the spot, but I think I could have made the experience better by asking her more direct questions about the paper (ex: how do you think such a sentence flows in conjunction with this sentence) as opposed to "does it have nice flow?" so, the experience was partially my fault, but the exercise went badly. A peer review can only work if both peers are actually engaged and caring about the review. This experience was a bad one because she was neither engaged nor caring.