The process of editing papers has always given me slight anxiety. Having other people read and judge my work causes me to immediately doubt my abilities as a writer. I know that I am definitely not the worst, but watching someone read my paper makes me cringe. I immediately wonder what they are thinking and demand their opinion right away. I think just from the nervous look on my face, people tell me exactly what I want to hear. After reading “Responding to Other Students’ Writing”, however, I want someone to judge my paper as a reader. I want to know what they think about the paper without considering my feelings; I want to know what I could improve on and what sounds awkward. I fully believe that that is the only way that I will be able to become a better writer.
As for the editing side, I am guilty of making the mistake of acting as a “writer” instead of a “reader”. I fix little mistakes like grammar and spelling, but I tend to avoid thinking about the paper as a whole. From now on, I am going to try to give people the advice that I know I would want. Editing and revising is probably the most important process in writing. Without fixing and working on a paper, it will never become something better. I think that a lot of my essays in the past had a lot of potential, but came out mediocre due to my laziness. If someone claims that my paper is good and I should not change anything, then I have no motivation to work on it. However, if someone took the time to tell me how the paper really sounds to them, I would have the incentive to try to fix it.
I have felt the exact same way, as I used to feel so stressed out and reluctant to have other people read my work. I would fear that my work would be awful and my peers would secretly be judging and laughing at what I wrote. But I’ve come to realize that having your work judged is not always a bad thing, and it is better to think of having work critiqued as more of a helping process than something to be seen as negative. Like you as well I also tend to correct a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes, and though it is tempting I’m also forcing myself to disregard a lot of that in order to focus on the real value in someone’s paper.
I think I had a similar feeling to yours when I would read a classmates work and pass judgement on it. Sometimes while reading their writing I would feel insecure about my own writing but as time passed my confidence in my writing skills grew and I am now an exceptional writer. Now I am beginning to become more comfortable critiquing other peoples writing by providing them their strengths and weaknesses in their essays.
I always get annoyed when I submit a rough draft and the corrections only have to do with spelling and grammar. Obviously we all can spell, and if we don’t know how to spell a specific word we can Google it. Same goes for grammar. So I think you make a very good point in saying that when editing we should focus more on the “big-picture,” idea level aspects of the writing, rather than the technical aspects that can be easily corrected later.