When I started to think about the definitions assignment, I wanted to choose a topic in my field of quantitative finance. I wanted to define something that’s not highly technical and people might have heard of in their daily lives so they would be interested to read about the definitions. I also wanted to be able to tell some real life story about the definitions. I thought about a movie I really enjoyed, the big short. It was about a bunch of hedge fund managers anticipated the crash of the US housing market, and they proposed the idea to major investment banks so that could bet against the market while everybody thought the housing market was rock solid. When the crash really came down, they made a huge amount of money, but the banks were not able to fulfill their debts and started the ripple of crashing the US financial market. I decided to discuss the financial instrument the hedge fund managers used to short sell the housing market, the credit default swap and help people to better understand what really happened in the 2008 financial crisis.

There are two mistakes I made in the writing process which my peer helped me to find out. First, I was too confident about a topic I am very familiar with and I just blazed through it without second thinking the wording I chose to use. I ended up thinking of a debtor but wrote the creditor instead. Second, I made a typo in my definition where I wrote load whereas I really intended to write loan. The two mistakes could have been avoided if I second guessed myself and carefully reviewed the definitions. What I think I did well was I used relatively easy wording and left out the technical details so that my reader could understand the concept relatively easily. Overall, it was a great learning process and I have definitely learned my lesson that prove reading my work is the most essential part of technical writing.

In the self editing process, I carefully re-read my work and corrected the error my partner pointed out as well as a few other errors. In the future, I will try to prove read my work more carefully and maybe ask other people for help to provide a second opinion.

Here is a link of the new draft of the definition: ENGL301_Assignment1_3_definition_Wei (Edwin) Chen_Draft2

Here is a a link for my peer’s review of the assignment: http://engl301.arts.ubc.ca/2017/01/31/assignment13-review-on-definition_siliangliu/