Peer Review: My Life At Pace University

My introduction to speech was effective and caught the audience’s attention. Making sure I had an attention getter, creditability and a thesis statement kept the audience engaged. The main points that I decided to over in my speech were that Letchworth State Park offers yearlong activities, tons of hiking trails to explore, and camping for everyone. I believe that I got my

With the semester approaching an end, our last speech was a tribute to one we felt as though made an impact in our society. Being the last speech, I wanted to end on a positive note and allow myself, as well as others to see the ways I have improved in public speaking. To make this speech successful, I incorporated the experience and knowledge I received from previous speeches. Though there is always room for improvement with the technical side of speaking, I believe the most important improvement you can make is how you present yourself.

This paper received no comments on the balance of my support, suggesting it was no longer a concern. Again, my thesis statement was praised, this time as “including tension and clearly connected to the unit focus.” However, I had a hard time creating topic sentences that reflected and supported the thesis statement as I did well in my first paper. The duality of my thesis statement made it difficult to tie my topic sentences back to the claim while also providing an introduction to an analysis and background of the topic. Therefore, I received some criticism about my topic sentences in comments such as, “provide a stronger topic sentence to set up support and tie to the thesis.” At the end of the paper, I was able to craft topic sentences that were more reflective of the thesis claim, and I received positive feedback for those sentences. Nonetheless, my topic sentences were the fatal flaw that kept me from getting an A on this

In writing the following compositions, I find that I have grown significantly as a writer. Implementing new concepts with each assignment, and determining the proper methods of using rhetoric to affect the desired audience, has enhanced my communications abilities. Now, having the opportunity to go back to the start and revise each work, I am able to review and understand my progress. While the target audiences of the works I have written about are clearly stated in each of my essays, my audience is my professor, fellow students, and possibly academia at large.

In this chapter, the author starts off by discussing the two ways of viewing public speaking. In one way, some may view it as terrifying, and even be angry towards it. Others may see it as an invitation to a journey that may last your entire lifetime. The author also discusses how most of our speeches will be impromptu. There is a one-point impromptu speech, as well as a standard impromptu speech. I enjoyed how the author gave helpful suggestions like keeping the speech short, stay organized, and stick to the point. Special occasion speeches are also discussed throughout this chapter. The goal of these is to unite the audience, reaffirm their beliefs, and honor specific individuals or a group. In order to succeed in a special occasion speech,

The in-class workshops, discussions, and activities component of this course definitely enhanced my experience and learning. I think the biggest benefit I derived from this component was the activity of peer review. I found this component helped me to reach the goal of engaging in formal and informal writing that analyzes and critically reflects on my major’s writing conventions and on my own writing practices and choices. In my academic experience, I often receive peer reviews that just say something to the effect of "good job." While it's nice to receive positive feedback it never helped me as a writer. I have always tried to offer solid advice on my peer reviews. I find it difficult to be critical of people's work, but I realize it is part

Always Better”. In it, I described how my mother was able to sway my young self into loving books and explains the benefits of the written media. As you can tell by all the purple marker the real hindrance of the essay was my atrocious grammar. Although I lacked many of the grammar skills that I have now the paper also shows my ability to organize and develop ideas since the start of the class. While it may not be one of my best pieces

The final topic that we talked about was fear. Fear was the only topic that had a negative connotation. They all agreed most people who are afraid of something do not usually overcome their fears. After talking about exploration, the word fear seemed to change the expressions on their faces, and the moods they were in. However, Scott said “the fear of failure is what pushes him to study and try hard in his schoolwork.” Jake had a similar comment to his one about power where he enjoyed it when certain people are in fear of him because it seems as if he has power over

Reflection for Essay 2 As a writer, I found that I struggled with three specific areas when attempting to complete the assignment for essay 2; inventing what to write about, arranging my ideas, and expressing my ideas. However, the most challenging was inventing what to write about. Once I narrowed my topic it was complicated to decide which details to include and which details to omit. Although this was a process analysis essay, and the details are important, it took some time to think about how to write the essay in such a manner that if someone were to read the process, would it make sense to the reader, or could the reader duplicate the process.

There are different journals which follow different types of peer review, based on the kind of research they publish as well as their journal management style. The single and double-blinded peer reviews are the most commonly adopted by many journals. In the single-blind review, the reviewer is aware of the author’s identity, but not vice versa. In the double-blind review, both the author and reviewer are not aware of the other’s identity. In the recent time, some academic journals have started adopting two other kinds of peer reviews called open and post-publication peer review. In the open review system, the identity of the author and reviewers is known, and this system may allow the comments made by the peer reviewer as well as authors’ responses to be published along with the final version of the manuscript. The post-publication peer review is a relatively new trend adopted by some open access publications in which reviewers evaluate a manuscript after it has been published on an open access platform. At this time, the identity of the author and the reviewer is known (published), and so is the peer review evaluation of the manuscript. This system may allow reviewers to get credit for their reviews (Rajagopalan, 2014). As seen by Ware and Monkman (2008), the double-blind review was the most effective approach appreciated by authors (71%), followed by single-blind (52%), post-publication (37%) and open peer review (26%).

By pushing myself to do something a million miles outside of my comfort zone, I was overwhelmed by positive results and gained confidence and overcame my extensive fear of speaking in front of audiences. I hope that through sharing my story, I can provide evidence as to how diving in headfirst, and how looking fear directly in the face can stomp out any slight possibility of it reoccurring. Through

Throughout the course of my semester in my Writing Seminar: American Boyhood, my writing has developed and more or less improved. I’ve gained experience in writing longer form analytical essays, and I’ve become more comfortable juggling multiple sources of wildly different types in the same paper as in my second paper “The Evolving Perception of Boy Friendship”, which compares the presentation of boy friendship across an academic essay, middle readers novel, popular essay, and a TV show. Beyond simply improving in writing technique though, I’ve become far more aware of my personal process, both the effective and ineffective aspects of it, and am in a better position to refine this process. In particular, I’ve improved in my ability to select and develop essay topics, and I’m more aware of my perfectionism and how to overcome it when writing a paper. However, my participation in American Boyhood also revealed to me that I am actually quite competent in providing meaningful feedback on the writing of others.

A 360-degree feedback system is also known as multi-rater feedback, multisource feedback, or multisource assessment which involves feedback from a number of sources including superiors, sub-ordinates, customers and peers. In some cases there is also self-assessment conducted. The system compiles a multitude of perceptions about performance to serve as the basis for an employee's future development. A literature review was conducted that examined the 360-system from different perspectives of the evaluation sources and finds that though the system can provide more comprehensive sets of data that sometimes the complexity of which serves to provide no value. However, in many cases, if administered properly the 360-degree evaluation system can be a valuable tool used for professional development in an organizational setting.

Following the “Life in a Bag” speech, it was time to prepare for the narrative speech. Picking a topic was more difficult than I originally thought. For a lot of people, (myself being one of them) picking a story to tell about yourself can cause the speaker to feel uncomfortable while presenting. The topic for the narrative speech did not need to be personal; however for me it seemed to be the most logical and easy way to go. I picked an embarrassing moment from my childhood when my sister replaced my toy from show and tell with a hairbrush. I looked over the notes that my peers had given me from my last speech and the biggest issues that needed to be fixed were making better eye contact, speaking at an extemporaneous level, and just being more prepared with what I was going to say. I prepared index cards for this speech, and I did rehearse my presentation which made me more fluent. When the time came to present I felt less nervous than I did for the

So what do I really want to achieve by giving this speech? Well, I need your help, they need your help.