To: Konstantin Mestnikov, Writing Team Member
From: Leif Jack, Writing Team Member
Date: June 29, 2022
Subject: Peer review of your proposal assignment
Hello Konstantin,
I enjoyed reading your research proposal! I find the topic of data visualization very interesting, and always love a good graph and the new information you can learn from it. You answered all the core questions of a proposal, and by the end I felt like I understood the problem with TechNotes, the problem’s background, your solution, and methods. I have some suggestions:
Organization: The overall layout of your proposal is excellent and guides your reader from the background of the problem to your solution. One thing to try might be to rearrange the order of certain sentences and combine some paragraphs. For example, in the proposed solution section, after you mention “empirically determine which techniques,” I was left wondering what “empirically determining” looks like. After reading a bit and getting to “we conduct a survey” I then understood fully what you meant. I think you could give the sentence more flow by saying “We conduct a survey” first, before you say “Drawing on previous work”, as the reader is given a familiar idea first, before moving to a new idea. Likewise, your ordering of paragraphs is good, but the second paragraph of the introduction felt like it belonged more in the Statement of Problem section, or that it could be combined with that section’s paragraph. The two paragraphs talk about similar ideas, so they could be combined, taking the best writing from both, while editing out unnecessary repetition
Audience: Your proposal has the right tone and technicality for the primary audience, however as someone not familiar with “nodes and edges’, I was a bit confused on those terms’ meaning. If they are essential to the proposal, a glossary or working definitions of “node” and “edge” would help non-technical readers (like marketing or finance managers) better understand the problem and offered solution. Alternatively, you could help non-technical readers with more concrete terms, like instead referring to nodes as “entries” and edges as “relationships.”
Clarity: The proposal explained the problem well and gave a good introduction of TechNotes, but the writing could be even sharper and clearer by editing sentences to use the active voice more or editing for conciseness. For example, “It contains various types of entries representing engineering concepts…” could be more concisely written as “It contains various entries on engineering concepts…”, with the number of nouns reduced. Meanwhile the sentence “One possible solution to make a graph visualization decluttered and more useful…” could use the active voice by replacing “would be” with “is”, and simply referring to “graph visualizations” as “graphs.” The sentence could be edited to something like “One solution to declutter a graph is to survey others on how to best represent graphs.”
Scope: Your choice of topic is good and you have the right scope of inquiry. For maximum clarity, the only addition to the Scope section I would suggest is a point like “Do these techniques actually work despite survey participants’ views?”, as you seemed interested in answering this question.
In conclusion, your proposal examines an intriguing problem and lays out a good process for solving it. With a bit of editing, the proposal could be stunningly clear, and fit excellently within a tech company’s workplace. I hope my feedback was useful, and I am open to answering any questions!
Leave a Reply