Peer review of Botrytis cinerea

To: Sidney Singh

From: Lea Ang Salamanca

Date: October 4, 2021

Subject: Review of your definition of Botrytis cinerea

I have reviewed your blog post about Botrytis cinerea https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2021wa/2021/09/30/defintion-of-botyris/

I appreciate the effort that you made in making the definition approachable for non-technical readers. As your peer-review partner, here are my thoughts and suggestions about your post.

Clarity: The parenthetical, sentence and expanded definitions of Botrytis cinerea are clear and accurate. Your post helps novice wine drinkers understand the complexity of sweet winemaking by using words that are easy to visualize.

The following methods of expansion in the blog post are:

• History
• Role of Botrytis cinerea in sweet wine production
• A visual of Botrytis cinerea in grapes
• Examples of popular brands of sweet wine from various countries
• Flavours created by the fungus in sweet wine

The above expansion methods provide adequate information introducing Botrytis cinerea‘s unique function in sweet winemaking to store customers. The inclusion of the brands of sweet wines and their flavours is beneficial for customers purchasing sweet wines. If I were the writer’s editor, I would only ask for minor revisions on the material’s organization and formatting.

Organization: In the last sentence of the first paragraph of the expanded definition, I suggest writing it as “The right conditions are needed for Botrytis to be beneficial as the fungus can easily destroy the grapes.” The first paragraph has sentences that highlight the benefits of Botrytis cinerea in making sweet wine. Switching the right conditions of Botrytis cinerea to the beginning of the sentence gives it a positive tone consistent with the other sentences. Stating the negative feature of the fungus at the end of the sentence introduces the readers to the complexity of using the fungus in sweet wine making which is explained in the next section (Lannon & Gurak, 2020).

The second sentence in the second paragraph is overstuffed. “Second, the ideal conditions in the vineyard are damp misty mornings to allow the growth and spread the fungus followed by warm, afternoon to limit the growth of the fungus and prevent it from destroying the grapes.” It will be helpful to break this sentence down into separate sentences to help the readers visualize the ideal conditions needed to make sweet wine (Lannon & Gurak, 2020).

Formatting: I suggest writing Botrytis cinerea in italics throughout the document. There is also a misaligned gap in the parenthetical definition “Botrytis cinerea( a fungus that grows on grapes; used for sweet wines).”

I hope that these suggestions are helpful. I used the book Technical Communication, fifteenth edition by Gurak and Lannon in making my suggestions.  If you have any questions, please send me an email at lholdo00@student.ubc.ca.

Best regards,

Lea Ang Salamanca