To: Konstantin Mestnikov
From: Piper Kim
Date: June 10th, 2022
Title of the Expanded Definition: Democracy
Subject: Peer Review of Three Definitions Assignment
Assignment being reviewed: Assignment-1.3-—-Piper-Kim-
I have reviewed the first draft of your Three Definitions assignment. Thank you for your great work! Your writing successfully articulates to the general audience, while your definitions have an appropriate level of detail. I would like to suggest you the following edits:
Fulfilling the assignment’s requirements: You have not described the ‘reading situation’ as the assignment instructed for your definitions. Without it, it is hard to judge their context and purpose as for which information would need to be included or not. For this reason, my comments below will assume a general context.
Organization: You chose effective expansion strategies for the term ‘democracy’. Etymology helps very much in grasping the meaning of the term, while history and comparison of government types provide useful background knowledge. I would recommend, however, to exchange the title (‘Negation’, ‘Visuals & Examples’) of each part in the extended definition to an FAQ-style question or a more informative title.
Furthermore, some of the sentences may benefit from being broken apart for clarity. For example, your sentence definition as well as the first sentence of ‘Etymology’ are slightly confusing due to their length. Also, the sentence starting with ‘Without the former proper governance…’ seems like a run-on sentence, and I would put a stop before the second ‘without’.
After reading the ‘Visuals & Examples’ section, I had a feeling that the first part of the paragraph did not quite relate to the figures that you introduce later. Furthermore, the part about the goals of democracy in the ‘History’ section does not relate to the history of democracy. I would suggest combing these two bits into a separate subsection called, for example, ‘Democracy goals and functioning’.
Flow: Some of your use of connecting words to provide overall flow seems a bit awkward. For example, in the sentence ‘Monarchy was historically one of the most common forms of government, meaning that there is one head of state.’, the use of ‘meaning’ seems to be problematic. That is because I would expect the second part of the sentence to comment or rephrase the meaning of the entire first part of it (that monarchy was the most common) since it starts with ‘meaning’. However, the second part only defined the term ‘monarchy’.
As another example, in ‘History’ section, the sentence that starts with ‘Years later, beginning in the 18th century…’ may need another connector other than ‘Years later’, as the events of establishing the United States democracy took place much later than first democracies in Ancient Greece. I would recommend just saying ‘The establishment of the democracy in the United States in the 18th century…”.
At other times, vague phrasing may lead to confusion. For example, the same sentence from before ends with ‘suffrage … was restricted in the 20th century’. One could interpret it as if suffrage was not restricted before but became restricted in the 20th century. You may rephrase it as ‘until the 20th century’. Additionally, the first sentence in ‘Visuals & Examples’ section goes as ‘There are many ways democracy is shown locally and nationally’. However, the paragraph is about how democracy manifests itself in different forms. So, I would recommend exchanging the words ‘is shown’ with ‘manifests itself’ or ‘works’.
Editing out the unnecessary: In a few places the information provided seems redundant or not necessary. For example, the last sentence in the ‘Etymology’ section describes what the two subparts of the word ‘democracy’ combine into, but this may not be necessary, as it is the word ‘democracy’ itself.
Another example is the sentence in the ‘Negation’ section starting with ‘However, it is clear that…’. The sentence goes on to reiterate what democracy is, and the connection to the previous sentence is not there. The sentence adds no useful information, and repeating the definition seems unnecessary.
Apart from that, I noticed that some phrases and words could be removed as they add to overall wordiness. For example, in your introduction you could exchange ‘three different definitions’ with ‘three definitions’. Further repetitions of the word ‘definition’ and the phrase ‘and with this assignment’ could be safely removed.
Visuals: Great choice for Figure 2! It shows a world perspective and current context for the term. However, perhaps it would be also useful to include a brief note of how the ranking/assessment was done to produce the image. On the other hand, Figure 1 does not seem to add much useful information to the definition. It is more a piece of art, and it may not be clear what it is trying to convey.
Other technical points: There are a few minor issues with missing articles, such as in ‘founding of the Western civilization’, as well as an unnecessary article in ‘in the history to create’, which needs to be just ‘in history to create’. Furthermore, I think that in ‘Free and fair elections’, ‘Fair’ does not need to be capitalized.
Overall, your writing has a solid foundation, and the overall organization is thought out well. I hope that my recommendations are helpful as you complete future revisions of this assignment. Please let me know if you have any questions.
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