My territorial beast is steadily waking...

Peer reviews bring out my hungry, territorial, vengeful, and offensive side. Maybe I should work on that....

Depending on how I feel about the person doing the review, my attitude coming into the review can be either defensive or eagerly anticipated (especially depending on how much I put myself into the writings being reviewed). However, both sides can surprise me in their review of my work and I have had complete changes of heart before so I am not as stubborn as many may say. Also, I am not one those who just look for praise. I view a simple praise of one's paper (or complete erratic hatred for that matter) as an obvious admission by the person that they did not even try to read the paper and understand that author's plight.

On the opposite end, I do not like to review other's papers for fear of being too corrective. I tend to look at spelling, punctuation, formatting, and grammatical errors before I actually notice flow or conceptual flaws in the paper. I also feel like a fraud in this respect, because I did extremely poor in all of my previous English classes (almost failing all of them throughout middle and high school); not to mention I am not even well versed in the vast array of topics. Even after all that, I try to just mention the things I do know and not just speculate is correct, but I still run into coming off like a arrogant intellectual that's not as intelligent as he boasts.

Needless to say, I feel peer reviews are not my forte.

Justin