To: Geneviève Bolduc
From Cody Gagnon
Date: June 10, 2020
Subject: Review of Unit 1:3 Assignment on Definitions
Your first draft of the unit 1:3 assignment on definitions looks great! Your expanded definition of heuristic is well organized and easy to understand. You have done a good job of incorporating several expansion strategies. I would like to offer the following suggestions.
Audience and Purpose: It might be helpful to add a brief description of the intended audience and purpose; without identifying an audience and purpose, it is difficult to know whether or not the definitions are appropriately detailed.
Parenthetical Definition: In terms of length, it may be difficult to distinguish differences between the parenthetical definition and the sentence definition. The textbook examples of parenthetical definitions are a few words only. The parenthetical definition could be shortened and placed within parentheses in the context of a sentence.
Brevity: A reader, even one with background knowledge of artificial intelligence, may have difficulty understanding the following sentence: “There are four measurements to determine whether an algorithm using heuristics should be used for a specific problem.” The meaning could be clarified by writing more concisely. For example, the sentence could be revised to read: “There are four measurements to determine whether a specific problem should be solved using heuristics.” Below are a few other instances of awkward phrasing that could be improved in terms of brevity and clarity.
- “The word heuristic came into definition in […]” à The word heuristic was established in […]
- “It would only be adopted by the field of computer science from the 1950’s onward.” à It was first adopted by the field of computer science in the 1950s.
- “The goal here is […]” à The goal is […]
- “will it always find a solution if there is one?” à Will it always find a solution if one exists?
Punctuation: There are a few misuses of punctuation in the definitions. First, “1950s” should be written without an apostrophe, as the use of an apostrophe signals possession or belonging. Second, the comma in the following sentence should be replaced with a full stop: “Heuristics are used to produce a reasonably good solution to a problem using approximations, below is an example.” Third, the word, “including,” introduces a new clause, so it should be preceded by a comma in the following sentence: “Heuristics can be used in many kinds of searches including malware detection.
Consistency: Consistent formatting is easier for readers to digest. In the example within the expanded definition, there is one instance of, “Jericho Beach,” and one instance of, “Jericho beach.” The word, “Beach,” should be capitalized in both cases. Similarly, in the bulleted list below the diagram, all bullet points begin with a capital letter following the colon except for the first bullet point.
Typographical Errors: There may be either an additional word or a word missing in the following sentence: “[…] it will choose to Jericho beach as the next location on the route.” Similarly, “[…] as the example above” should be written as “[…] as in the example above.”
In-text Citations: Dr. Paterson specified on the course’s Facebook page that in-text citations should be used in the definitions.
I hope that you find my suggestions helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Overall, this assignment has been well done. Surely, your next draft will be even better!