Peer Review for Maxwell Parise

In this blog I will peer review Maxwell's production report of his introduction. This leaves me to do activity 4.


For this activity I should focus on the resources available and short cuts, since I have already finished my project. Hopefully there are some common mistakes I've already made so that I can save Maxwell from doing them.


His production schedule is in his blog.

I think I helped maxwell by sharing my personal experience with videos. After reading what he had planned I was actually excited for him because he sounds like he knows what he's doing and the genre he is doing is his favorite one. I felt I helped him when telling him what I'd like to see as an audience member because I was genuinely interested in what he was trying to do.


Since I was so interested, and felt like an audience member, I gave him a good preview for what he was planning on doing. I was kind of like a one man focus group, letting him know what I liked and what I thought he should add. This gives a very beneficial and hard perspective to imagine so I hope Maxwell uses the advice.

Editorial Report B

This is a continuation of Editorial Report A, except with my first body section instead of the intro.

Rough Cut. Section 1: Writing before this semester

Strict rules

Objective all the time

No personal input

Meaningless work

No personal connection to work

All this leads to me making a generic product that'll meet criteria

I never practiced transferring my own thoughts to paper





Revised version:

Certain rules I thought I needed

Throughout grade school, teachers held certain rules and standards that we were supposed to follow. This included always using third person, never dropping register, and following specific formulas for writing essays. This was necessary early on as we had to have some structure for our growing writing skills.

No Freedom

The structures turned into shackles as we progressed through school. My brain solidified the patterns of focusing our efforts on satisfying this mold instead of the content and ideas presented. I think this may come from the misconception that highschoolers cannot have abstract thought or compelling and interesting arguments. Every assignment we did involved reading a novel or excerpt from a popular literary piece. Not to mention it was common to reread certain excerpts and plays. I don’t even know how many times I’ve been forced to read Shakespeare. Besides the few outliers, most kids in my classes, including me, were not interested in reading and analyzing the same content over and over again. Students simply did not want to engage in the material, producing minimal work. I felt no motivation to put in as much effort as I could of. I still got good grades on my writing assignments and was able to get a 4 on the AP test. When I got to college I realized that even though I was getting good grades, I had been forming all the wrong habits while I was in high school. 


There was a big change in content for this section. I originally wanted to try to just have the talking points and try to do the podcast without reading from a script. I was not satisfied with the quality of this so I defaulted to making a script. This actually helped a lot. I was able to have a lot better flow with my words. 


The biggest change in form for this section was that I have ambient sound in the background to distract from my voice. I adjusted the volume so it is still audible but does not overpower my own audio. 

Editorial Report A

In this blog post I'm going to compare sections from my rough cut and sections form my final cut. I will explain how the content changed, including form and content.

Rough Cut of Intro:

Hello, everyone. My name is Ben Macklin and this podcast is about my past semester in Sean Bottai's honors english class. Like most students this time of the year, I am reflecting over the past semester and thinking about how I did. While I was doing this I realized some major problems in my writing process. This was no surprise to me. Through this analysis, however, I realized what to watch out for next semester, in order to avoid some of the common pitfalls of writing like procrastinating and writers block.


I am doing a podcast for the last project. Since I'm doing this genre, I knew I needed to keep my intro short and too the point. In this rough draft I tried to get to the point but also provide enough background information. I know I will also have to add some kind of audio clip to keep the audience interested.


Here is the revised version:

Hello, my name is Ben Macklin. Like the many new freshman of 2015 I started college this past year. Specifically, I am finishing an honors English course at the university of Arizona. The course is set up where there are 4 major projects a semester and 1 set of blog posts a week. To be honest I was not expecting to have to adapt too much from my ap classes in highschool. I soon found out that a lot of what I learned from grade school and the habits I formed during this time were not really preparing me for the standards in a higher level education course.

This caused me to evaluate what was working before and how I needed to adapt to succeed in College. So this podcast I want to talk about how the different environments I was in effected my writing process and some of the skills I learned this semester.


I changed how I worded almost everything. Even though this was a content change, I really did it because of form. I kept changing words around until it sounded good when I actually spoke it. I still stuck to the major points of providing background and tried to keep it relatively short. 



You can't hear it but on my actual fine cut I added music that fades in as the intro finishes and then a nice lead in to the rest of the podcast with a short excerpt from the same song. This makes the listener stay engaged and provides a good pause between the intro and body.

Open Post to Peer Reviewers

Here is a link to my podcast. I just used iMovie because it was the easiest for me to make but my genre is podcasts.

The main idea I guess I should mention is that there really isn't too much more I could have talked about. I felt like if I tried to talk about too much more I would have strayed away from the main point I am trying to make. I'm not really the type of person to do the same thing the same way every time or create a routine so it's hard for me to talk about my writing process. Its just kind of all over the place.


I think the biggest weakness of my podcast is that I had to read from a script. It was hard to try to just talk and remain articulate. I tried to improve in certain areas but I get too nervous so it doesn't work out to well.


Personally, I love the music. I think its a good thing to have in a podcast and it helped make my boring voice more interesting. I think I also organized it very well, transitioning from point to point smoothly.

Peer Review for Jason Boley

In this blog post I reviewed Jason Boley's Production Schedule.

I chose to review activity 4, focusing on the major tasks that need to get done and what resources are being used to do them.


I told Jason that it could be a good idea to dedicate one of his editing days to peer edits. I suggested that he bring his project to class on Tuesday. This would be a great way to get a second opinion on the project without having to bother someone outside of class to review it.


There was't much I took from the guide book. Peer reviewing is pretty general and is something we've been doing all year. The guide does mention that in the final stages of development it is good to have a stranger look at the project, in order to give an idea about where the project is at.

I was very impressed with Jason's schedule. It was color coordinated, organized, and to the point.