It was great to receive feedback and formal tips on how best to traditionally represent oneself in a professional manner on LinkedIn.  That being said, I did find the experience mildly invasive, since LinkedIn is a public stage and as a mature student who has had a LinkedIn profile for a number of years, I have established how I personally wish to represent myself and that choice goes against the traditional.

Brainstorming and preparing my report proposal and outline was a great exercise in thinking about and planning the steps to complete the larger task of writing the report.  I believe it is progressing nicely.  I am slightly concerned since I do not have a clear picture on how it will all come together but once I gather the data, review example reports and begin my own report, I am sure I will feel more confident.

The peer review of my partner’s formal report proposal was my favourite assignment in this unit.  At first I thought it would be a hard exercise since my partner is a stellar student.  Knowing that, however, encouraged me to think deeply about how I could help him improve his work.  The suggestions I came up with are things that not only help him but can also strengthen my own report —  a fruitful happenstance.

Through the peer review process, my partner helped me see areas in which I could bolster my proposal by citing a specific consequence of the problem as well as supply a bit more concrete information on how to solve the problem.  In addition, he was able to help smooth out the small grammatical errors my tired eyes missed.

Peer reviewing has largely impacted my view of writing.  Not only does my peer’s suggestion improve my work, my recommendations also allow me to think about writing as a whole and take that experience and bring it back into my work.

Peer Review by Wes Berry

Revised Report Proposal (based on Wes Berry’s suggestions)

The three definitions assignment was fun and challenging.  It was a new way to approach writing and for that I was curious to try it out.  The expanded definition flowed, as its process is very similar to writing a research paper.  The part that was interesting — and tricky to carve out —  was the sentence definition, since it required a quick and exacting language. The chosen words had to be hand-picked and precise.  I got caught up in the precision of the words and because of this, I forgot my audience and chose words that may not been quite right for a lay person.

Luckily I had Daniel’s peer review to help me out of this tangle.  He was able to pin-point the problem (mainly the word derivative – which is a bit of a five dollar word that has numerous meanings) and offer a nice solution. He also made my writing stronger by telling me to move some of the visuals’ captions into the main body of the text and labeling areas with (fig 1), so people would know when they should refer to the visuals for further clarification.

Daniel also suggested that I remove the etymology of skeuomorph as he found ‘container’ misleading to the word’s definition.  I refrained from completely removing it, as I think the etymology of all words is important, even though we may not clearly see why. Instead, I compromised with Daniel, by replacing ‘container’ with ‘vessel’ and added further words like ‘dress’, ‘equipment’, ‘tools’, etc (since skeuos means all of these things).  In this regard, I am hoping it will add a little more light to the term’s origin and, at the same time, be less distracting as ‘container’ was for Daniel.

From this exercise, I have learned:

• It is sometimes hard to be both precise and use simple words.
• That having someone review your work makes it stronger, as it not only allows for another set of eyes on the work but it also gives you a set of fresh eyes when returning to your work and considering it through the gaze of your reviewer.

RevisionSkeuomorph-ThreeDefinitions-AlexisJensen

Peer Review by Daniel Chen