Without a doubt, I am a bit of a control freak, especially when it comes to writing. When I am asked to peer edit, one of the things that I notice most easily; is word choice and sentence flow. I feel motivated to change these things, to rearrange sentences, and swap words for their synonyms.
Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Suggesting to reword a sentence is a perfectly valid critique of an essay. My personal flaw, is that I don’t know when to stop. I will continue to reword and “polish” another person’s essay, until it looks like a mirror image of my own. And that is unfair to the person who wrote the essay, because I have now hijacked their paper, and removed any original thoughts that they may have had, in favor of my own.
What I took away from this exercise, is that word choice is not the only change that can be made to an essay. For my own essay, I will be expanding on some of the assertions that I made, which I also suggested to one of my peers.
Link to comment: http://elishaemerson.uneportfolio.org/2018/02/06/stakes-and-the-introductory-paragraph-2/#comment-346
