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.