I am in a class in university that consists of only juniors and seniors. In this class, I sit in the second row all the way to the left. It being a higher level class that doesn't always take attendance, many people decide not to show up to class, so there are often empty seats around me. However, I always sit next to my friend and there is always someone sitting in front of me.

An assignment for the class is to write an Op-Ed, basically a short opinionated article. As part of the assignment, everyone in the class was randomly assigned two others to peer review their article.

Of the two I was assigned, one was pretty good. They had a few grammatical errors and their points were a little confusing at times, but overall decent. I also didn't know too much about their topic to begin with.

The second one I reviewed was a train wreck at best. There were so many grammatical errors that I couldn't even read through the paper once without having to make corrections. Their sentence structure was so bad that I had to stop and try to parce out what it was supposed to say. I also knew a lot about this topic since I had written a paper on it a semester ago. They had the basic idea about the topic, but they left out a huge part of it that was really important to their point they were making.  All of that I left in my review that had my name attached to it online, but I didn't know who the person really was.

As class was ending the other day, my friend and I's conversation drifted to the Op-Eds that we had reviewed as people were packing up to leave. It turns out that he had looked at the first one I reviewed for fun and he had liked it as well. The other one he reviewed had some issues, but was ok overall. I told him about the topic that my second reviewed Op-Ed was about and what the person had left out. I reffered to the grammatical errors and bad sentence structure as a "hot mess" as I complained.

I started to hear someone near me saying "hey" to get my attention and I looked up at the person who sat right in front of me. They informed me that I was talking about their paper and then walked away. My friend and I got real quiet and he gave me a 'you really screwed up now' face. I said that I stand by what I said, since basically all the things I mentioned were in my review online that had my name attached to it anyway.

Now I'm not sure if I should feel bad about trash talking someone's paper and them calling me out for it.