I do a lot of editing professionally, but reviewing the academic work of my peers still feels a little awkward to me. Maybe it's the sense of ownership inherent in the academic work that worries me. Clients might change everything about a project, so a person learns not to become attached to the words they strung together at work. But academic writing is a lot more personal in some ways and sometimes it feels uncomfortable to be challenging or questioning something my classmates have crafted.
There's also an element of self-doubt involved. Because I haven't read the same articles and had the same background as the author, maybe I don't understand some nuanced part of what's being stated. (So maybe that comment I was going to make about the author's argument is total crap!)
I think that lack of shared background in a situation like this (where everyone is working on very different topics with outside sources) leads me to fall back on stuff I know. I noticed myself focusing on article structure and craft a little more than on the use of the sources we all had in common. I could probably use a little more practice at the analyzing an argument part of this.
That said, I found looking at somebody else's work useful to rethinking my own writing. I've got a running list in my head of things I spotted elsewhere that I want to go fix in my paper. I wrote back to my reviewers that I find it really helpful to have someone else (who hasn't been living and breathing the topic) let me know where I need to smooth things out. It's kind of amazing what a person's brain will just fill in for them. (and kind of horrifying, when it's a really bad spelling error that you've been overlooking!)
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