Who Gets the Benefit of Peer Review?

Recently, my wife and I had a discussion about the effectiveness of peer review.

For context, the discussion took place in a chat room for English instructors at BYU-Idaho. Screencapped here:

Says my wife:

I've been thinking about the breakout groups we had during our meeting the other night. As English teachers, we seem to have such a love-hate relationship with peer reviews. Is the purpose really to have the students help each other? Or do they do more damage than good sometimes? I told my breakout group that I cringe when bad advice is given, such as the student who told another student they needed to "put more fluff" in their paper, in order to meet the word count. Ack! For my own students, when they express nervousness over just how well they'll be able to review someone else's paper, I tell them the real reason I like peer reviews is so that the reviewer gets experience by looking at someone else's paper and then thinking about what worked and what didn't, and how that may influence their own writing. I realize different teachers may see the purposes of a peer review differently, but I had this thought: what if everyone was required to offer a review to at least one classmate, but it's a review only the teacher ever sees? Then I can see that they are using their powers of observation to help them grow as a writer, and the student having his paper reviewed can't be damaged by less than helpful comments. Is the result worth the effort, or is this just busy work?

Says me:

Is the result worth the effort, or is this just busy work?

That's a tough question to answer because it's subjective. We all know our students arrive at different writing skill levels. Some really crave the feedback and are open to it, whether they're good writers or not. Some don't care what others have to say, no matter their own skill level -- we see this when we offer our own feedback.

From my perspective, peer reviews are more to the benefit of the person doing the review than the one receiving it. For example, I recently had a friend ask me to read a snippet from a novel she's editing to check if the French being used was accurate. I put on my wobbly French copy editing hat and went to work -- but then realized there's a lot more to the scene than just correct French.

One character was a native French speaker, but a child --- so their French was going to be more French, but also prone to the shortcuts one takes when learning a language. The other character was a native English speaker speaking in French, so their French needed to have a more "translated from English" feel.

But then that got me to thinking -- how long has this second character known French? Maybe she's better at it than I give her credit for. And as for the second character, do I know how a French child would speak?

So. Many. Questions. And questions that I take back to my own fiction writing as I develop my characters. Less flying by the seat of my pants, more planning things out.

Maybe the author I helped in this instance will appreciate my effort. But I learned a bit more about characterization in the peer review than I expected.

To sum up: I think both my wife and I agree that the one who gets the most out of peer review is the one who performs the review, not the one who receives it.

That is of course, subjective (see the above comment on adding fluff to meet the word count).

So to say the benefit goes mostly to the reviewer is problematic. The reviewer has to be advanced enough in his or her writing career to be self-aware enough to recognize when advice given to another writer is advice that could also be applied to himself or herself.

I think I might be at that point.

Not that I'm a genius. I am not. But when I spend time reading others' writing in peer review situations, I look at what I'm telling the author and think, "Yeah, that's something I need to work on as well."

So I need to do more peer reviews. But they're hard to find unless I want to review romances. Ew.