To: Geneviève Bolduc
From: Cody Gagnon
Date: June 10, 2020
Subject: Review of Unit 1:3 Assignment on Definitions (https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-98a-2020sa/2020/06/05/unit-13-definitions-3/)
I have finished reading your first draft of the unit 1:3 assignment on definitions. 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 your 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 is difficult for me to distinguish differences between your parenthetical definition and your sentence definition. The textbook examples of parenthetical definitions are a few words only. I think you could shorten your parenthetical definition and place it within parentheses in the context of a sentence.
Brevity: I have taken CPSC 322 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, so I believe I have sufficient background knowledge, but I had difficulty understanding the following sentence: “There are four measurements to determine whether an algorithm using heuristics should be used for a specific problem.” I think that you could clarify your meaning by writing more concisely. For example, you could revise the sentence to read: “There are four measurements to determine whether a specific problem should be solved using heuristics.” I found a few other instances that I think could be written more concisely:
- “The word heuristic came into definition in […]” –>The word heuristic was established in […]
- “It would only be adopted by the field of computer science from the 1950’s onward.” –> It was first adopted by the field of computer science in the 1950s.
- “The goal here is […]” –> The goal is […]
- “will it always find a solution if there is one?” –> Will it always find a solution if one exists?
Punctuation: There are, I believe, a few misuses of punctuation in your definitions. First, I believe that “1950s” should be written without an apostrophe, as the use of an apostrophe signals possession or belonging. Second, I think that 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.
Uniformity: In my opinion, it is best to use uniform formatting. In the example that you use within the expanded definition, you first write, “Jericho Beach,” and then you write, “Jericho beach.” I think that 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: I believe that there is 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, I think that “[…] 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 we should use in-text citations in our definitions.
I hope that you find my suggestions helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Overall, I think that this assignment has been well done. I am sure that your next draft will be even better!
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