TO: Jiajie Xu, Thoth – writing team member
FROM: Zainab Rauf Tramboo, Thoth – writing team member
DATE: June 9, 2020
SUBJECT: Review of Your Technical Definitions Assignment for English 301
I have reviewed the first draft of your technical definitions assignment. Thank you for the notable effort you put into your work. Your work is well structured and your definition takes into account a significant amount of information one needs to be educated about the topic. I would like to offer you the following suggestions:
Technicality:
Phrasing-
· You can try to condense this statement in the introduction paragraph “The situation will be set as a fourth-year ….. students graduated from high .. in environmental science.” “The situation will be set as a fourth-year university student majoring in environmental science giving a presentation to his juniors in the first year”
· “The relative process and their causing elements are shown as below..” can be better phrased as “The relative process of how the Lane’s Scale works and the elements that cause the process are visually depicted and briefly explained below.”
· The statement “As well as demonstrating the process ….self-adjusting those elements show on the scale to maintain the balance.”, can be rephrased as “As well as demonstrating the self-adjusting process (channel aggradation/degradation) that the stream system goes through in order to maintain a balance between the sedimentation and water levels”.
Jargon– I do not have any background in environmental science and so I think it was easy for me to catch on technical jargon that could need further explanation from your side. For example, I did not know what the words fluvial, geomorphology, & sedimentation meant. Although, you did a good job in explaining words like aggradation and degradation. I suggest putting a short statement about you further explaining critical sub terminologies, under a separate subheading in your operating principle expansion strategy (before you go further in properly explain the process of Lane’s scale).
Grammar-
· “The term “Lane’s Scale” will be the word that I am going…”
· “Whatever you are doing your research in, the river restoration or river engineering field and suchlike, it tells you the fundamental concept…”
· “It has been displayed on the model that on one side we have sediments and water..”
·“..the water input can be dramatically increased when there is a storm comes through, and this can be reflected on the balance that the water will get loss at the bottom of waterside as the water in the container is getting flood over”. This can be condensed and grammatically corrected to “In presence of a storm, the level of water input dramatically increases. As illustrated on Lane’s Balance, this would lead to water loss …”
· “If it is unable to get rid of the sediments..”
· “…makes it goes down, this results in channel aggradation at the end.”
Citations- You don’t need the citation (Lane, E. W., 1955) as you already state the name and the year of the author and their research work in your sentence.
Organization: I noticed that in the expanded definition section of your document, you have used subtitles in three of the four expansion strategies. After reading your operating principle and visual expansion strategies, I believe it would be better to restructure the paragraph below the image, as in, put the para stating “In terms of water and sediments… related to the channel geometry” in the operating principle expansion strategy. Then in the visual expansion strategy, you can go ahead and give a detailed explanation of what we see in the image; “The relative process and their causing elements are shown as below..”. Or you could start off your paragraph under visual subheading by saying “The relative process and their causing elements are shown as below..”, then put the image and then after the bullet points state “In terms of water and sediments… related to the channel geometry”, as the ending.
I also suggest removing aggradation & degradation as bullet points and formatting them as Center Texts. This would then help the reader go with the flow of understanding the respective processes/happenings/results of aggradation & degradation illustrated by Lane’s Scale.
Visuals: Great use of the image. I was able to visualize everything you tried to narrate through your words perfectly from the image. You might want to download the image from the original site and then paste in on your text so that it does not seem blurry even if you increase the size of the image.
Purpose & Audience: I believe your introduction paragraph was excellent in addressing the assignment and intended audience. Since the instructions for this assignment included defining a reading situation, it was great to see you pay attention to this little detail as you mentioned ‘giving a presentation’ as your reading situation.
Definition of term: I think that the last paragraph, in which you gave an example of what happens when water input dramatically increases, was particularly strong. It summed up the entire process of Lane’s Scale nicely, leaving the reader with a clear reference point.
I hope my recommendations are useful in editing your first draft. Your document provided me with a good understanding of the term “Lane’s Scale”. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance as you complete this assignment. Good luck with your final draft!
Link to Jiajie’s first draft:
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