Writing My Definition
Writing my own definition gave me a good lesson that I need to focus more on the target audience than myself when I write. The first mistake I made was that I decided to write the definition I am so familiar with that I did not consider how difficult the term would be for the audience. I chose the term ‘time complexity’ because I use this term every day as I study Computer Science. However, as I explain the term from the very scratch, I realized that I may have chosen a word that is too complex for non-technical readers. For this reason, my writing became very long to elaborate on the correct meaning of the term. I felt the great importance of fitting my writing to the target audience through this assignment. Even though the writing became longer than I planned, it was a valuable experience to learn how to explain a new concept to the audience using different definitions. Also, keeping my writing in a professional format throughout the assignment was good practice for my career.
Peer Review
The definition I reviewed Benson’s definition, which is about the term ‘abstraction’ used in Computer Science like mine. As soon as I read my teammate’s review, so I realized that I should’ve chosen a simpler concept like this if I had wanted to explain a concept from Computer Science. This definition was a good example of an easy and informative definition. However, my duty was to find room for improvements in many different aspects of writing. I studied the correct ways of writing definitions and proper formatting. Therefore, I could spot a couple of mistakes and a few ways to improve Benson’s writing. A valuable achievement from this review was that I discovered that I made the same mistake I found in Benson’s writing such as an abrupt ending of the assignment. Thus, this was also a good opportunity to reflect on my own writing as well in the end.
Revisions
Having my writing reviewed by a third person was a definitely effective way to find the strength and the weakness in my writing. Denis thoroughly reviewed my writing and analyzed problems with my writing and potential solutions. The noticeable one was that Denis felt that my writing has a certain degree of difficulty for non-technical readers even though I put quite an effort to elaborate on the term using an easy example. I realized the importance of choosing a good topic for the target reader again. To make my writing easier for the target audience, I removed some numbers and unnecessary computations in my writing and made my example simpler by removing redundant sentences. Other than that, Denis gave some good suggestions to improve the readability of my writing such as better spacing between paragraphs, and a change in a position of a figure. I agreed to those suggestions and applied them to write my revised definition. I found that the readability of the writing improved after revision. Lastly, she pointed out that my citation list is not in alphabetical order which I did not even know was required. I fixed it as well and it was nice to learn something that I did not know about technical writing.
Overall, unit one was a very good learning opportunity for me to learn the fundamentals of technical writing such as audience targeting, different ways to explain a concept, and writing in a proper format. The three processes of Writing-Reviewing-Revision were a definitely effective way to diagnose my writing and find a way to improve it.
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