When we peer edit we can see that the task becomes complicated simply because the process involves commenting on the work of our friends of fellow students. This makes the task difficult because we see a type of bias in our editing. In statistics it is desired to reduce as much bias as possible to gain a generally more accurate set of data, and to do this we must either single blind or double blind our subjects. The concept behind blinding is simple, in a single blind one party, either the examiners or the test subjects must not have knowledge of the other. For example, if I gave a test out to the class, they should take the test without my presence, or another option is as I am grading their test I refrain from gaining knowledge of their names. A double blind is similar, except instead of blinding one party both parties have no knowledge of the other, hence the test results are not affected by the subjects feeling pressured by the presence of the test administrator or the administers grading by their relationship with the subject(s). Generally blinding works, however on page 98 of "Research in the classroom" we see how in Spear's method a reviewer must expose his or her own self to the writer, which in turn provides a larger margin of error for a type bias to form. I believe that this gets in the way of our results when we know that we are close to our peers. The feeling of telling someone you’ve gotten close to is awkward, mostly because you don’t want to make them feel as if you’re insulting them. However, as long as all comments are purely based on facts the writer should not feel insulted. I feel that these factors all play into how we individually respond to the work of our peers, but with practice the reader can learn how to omit these factors from their revision strategies, and produce a better and more helpful response to the writer, hence increasing improvement on both sides of the text.
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