Peer Reviews

I thought that the peer review went pretty well for the most part, but I personally don't find peer reviews super helpful besides the fact that they help pick out grammatical errors. Finding grammatical errors is good but its something that you can usually pick out by yourself if you read it over a few times and look for the errors. I think the reason that peer reviews aren't as useful as they could be is because usually you're looking for helpful tips on where you should go with writing the paper and often the people you're working with aren't even positive on where their paper is going which makes it hard for them to help you. I think that voluntary peer reviews could work better because you can decide who is looking at your paper and you can decide to have multiple people look at it, giving you more advice to chose from.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

In Sedarus' "Me Talk Pretty One Day" he uses a lot of different techniques to describe how fearful he was of his French Professor. Before arriving in France he was so confident of his speaking abilities but after his first day of class the professor talked him down so much that he didn't even want to go to the grocery store for fear that he would mess up.  If I were to write a personal narrative describing my fears associated with learning something new, especially if it was in a setting like Sedaris I would have used dialogue in a similar  way because it really got his point across in showing how lost he was. Also the way that he showed how everyone else was feeling the same way that he did really helped to show just how awful his professor was. I would show where i started in my learning of the new language or subject and then where i ended and how i got there. you can't just say it was really difficult and after a little practice it got a lot easier, you have to really show how you got there which is exactly what Sedaris did, and what I would do if i had to write a personal narrative like his.