Collaboration and Peer Reviews - Essay Example

There are disadvantages, however, such as sometimes having one’s ideas rejected or significantly altered before they are put on paper, and having to accommodate other people’s schedules and life. One of the major advantages to collaborating on a project is that one gets a different set of expertise that can inform the work being done. Specialization is key in w wide variety of fields, because the amount of knowledge and experience in the world is exploding at a much greater rate than someone can actually keep up with it.

Thus collaborating allows someone to access knowledge and expertise they may not otherwise have, which can provide different points of view, subtlety to an argument, or even correct errors that are made in the original judgement. Another benefits of collaborating on projects is having another person to bounce ideas off of, that can be more critical than one usually is to one’s self. Sometimes other people can see errors in thinking that another person cannot, and this help protect anyone collaborating on a project from accidentally publishing things that might not be accurate when viewed critically.

It is very, very difficult to be thoroughly critical about one’s own ideas, so having another person who can do that can be incredibly helpful on a variety of levels. While collaboration has a number of advantages, it also has some disadvantages. Collaborating necessarily means compromise. Sometimes people will differ on where to put emphasis, or perhaps on even more major issues such as whether or not something is an argument that they should be making. Collaborating means that sometimes each person’s ideas will be heavily edited before they get out, which can lead to somewhat less creative or outside the box thinking.

Furthermore, collaborating takes a lot more time than working on something alone can – one has to accommodate their collaborator’s schedule, life and so on, so instead of just working when and how one wants, one has to sometimes wait for feedback, go over things several times and so forth. Collaboration does have some disadvantages that detract from its overall advantages. One of the things I learned through reviewing my peers work is how much easier it is to see negative things in another person’s work than one’s own.

After reviewing a peer’s work, I went back and looked for those same issues in my own, and many of them were present. Furthermore, I learned that it is much easier to see what is done improperly (bad grammar, structure errors and so on) than to appreciate what is done well. One of the major advantages of having a peer review my paper was catching errors in logic or communication that I would not see. Obviously I created the ideas and arguments I use when writing a paper, so when I read it back to myself it always makes perfect sense – I know what I’m talking about.

Another person, however, can only glean what your argument means from the writing you put on the page, so it can really highlight things that you have not communicated well enough, or that do not make sense without added detail. One of the disadvantages to having a peer review my work before I submit it is that sometimes having someone else review my work can