To: Peter Yang, English 301 Student Writer
From: Juanita Kwok, English 301 Student Reviewer
Date: July 27th, 2022
Subject: Peer Review of Formal Report Draft: Improve Lighting on Campus
Thank you for submitting this proposal for determining the possibility of increasing streetlights onto UBC’s Vancouver campus. You have done an outstanding job in providing a good basis for the safety issues and concerns of students on this topic. Please see below for my suggestions on how you can further improve this proposal:
Organization:
The proposal is easy to follow and well organized in a logical order. All of your titles are bolded and underlined which make the sections easy to find and identify. My suggestion would be to remain consistent on formatting and sentence case:
- All of your subtitles follow sentence case, but Description of problem is title case.
- Your figures are numbered accordingly but would be more impactful if it were integrated with your interpretations afterwards to break up the imagery. Alternatively, you can put your survey questions into the appendix as stated in the guidelines for formal report.
First Impressions:
- Who is your report addressed to? I see our professor’s name on your cover page which doesn’t need to be there if the report is not addressed to her.
- Insufficient use of secondary sources, the only data source is the survey you conducted (primary)
- I would recommend drawing some findings from published articles and other references to support your argument.
Table of Contents:
- Unnecessary to put each figure in Table of Contents, replacing with “Figures” is sufficient
- Change “Work Citation” to “Works Cited”
- There are no page numbers associated with the Table of Contents
Abstract:
- Type out “University of British Columbia” the first time you mention it in case it is unfamiliar to readers with an abbreviation in parentheses as this is standard when using abbreviations in reports.
- i.e. University of British Columbia (UBC)
- Grammar/ spelling correction: change “a 9 questioned survey” to nine question survey and add an ‘s’ at the end of six questions
- Edit for conciseness: “majority of participants are third or fourth year students majoring in Arts”
- “However, 80% of students agree that UBC campus is dark” is missing a period or needs further explanation to complete the sentence.
Introduction:
- Background: it is recommended to cite where you found UBC’s creation date to establish credibility.
- Slightly repetitive with the campus being beautiful
- Figure 1 label would be better directly above or below the photo with an explanation of what it is, this comment applies to the rest of the figures as well.
- “Despite many trees and limited streetlights, walking to class at night can be intimidating” This is contradictory as trees contribute to darkness.
- Minimize use of pronouns throughout the report
- Figure 2 looks like it is a part of the Aquatic Centre sentence, which needs a period (and spelled -re because Canadian spelling).
- Reworded for clarity: “As recently as last year there was a car accident where two students passed away due to limited visibility of the driver.” In this statement, it doesn’t actually specify in the article that darkness was a factor in the crash, please double check this.
- Edit for conciseness: “Criminal activities are more likely to happen in darkness”.
Scope:
- This would be easier to read if it were a bulleted or numbered list with each question taking its own line
- In your scope, it mentions which locations on campus need the most lights, it would be helpful to specify the exact locations and number of streetlights needed with a campus map
Data Collection:
- Edit: “In order to figure out what people think”
- Are students the only participants answering the survey, as you mention it needs to consider thoughts beyond students such as faculty and staff.
Participants and Analysis:
- “As well as the participants’ year of study, degree, and gender from people who filled out the survey.” This is an incomplete sentence.
- Following this, another incomplete sentence: “This will allow me to know who filled out the form, and”
Findings
- Edit to first sentence for clarity: “I was surprised to find out other students had similar experiences with a dark and/or unsafe campus”.
- Figures: It would be helpful to explain the rating scale a little further or provide associations (e.g. Figure 6: 1 = I feel extremely unsafe and 10 = I am perfectly safe)
- The questions you have asked don’t match with a rating scale, they would be better as radio questions with options such as “Strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree” as the scale is hard to quantify for participants (e.g. What dictates a level 10 rating vs. an 8 rating for safety?)
- Figure 6 Question revised: Do you feel safe walking around on campus at night?
- Figure 7 Question revised: Do you believe certain areas on campus are too dark at night?
- Figure 8 Question revised: Do you think UBC should increase the number of streetlights on campus?
- Figure 9 Question revised: Are you affected by the limited number of streetlights when taking night time classes?
- Figure 10 Question revised: Are majority of your classes within reasonable walking distance (e.g. 5 minutes)
- This question asks whether their classes are far and close which are opposing terms, are you asking if they are close or are you asking if they are far? Combining them both into the same question makes it confusing to answer.
- In your analysis, speaking to what year the university students are, how does that help support your case? Are you able to draw conclusions that fifth year students are more likely to be affected by the limited streetlights? Same thing with their major and gender, how does that impact the end results? Rather than just listing out demographics for the survey, it would be extremely beneficial to draw some conclusions here.
- When you say females are more at risk to assault, kidnapping, and rape – where is your evidence of this?
Recommendations:
- When recommending streetlights to be installed at the aquatic centre and IKB, what is your reasoning over other darker areas?
As mentioned earlier, it would be helpful to have a map of UBC labelled with areas of darkness and where the street lamps should go, how many of them, voltage, etc. to further refine your recommendations for the intended reader.
Summary
Overall, this is a fulsome draft for your formal report and an important investigation that could help many students and faculty during the darker winter months. I hope these suggestions are helpful for the revision process. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or further clarification. Thank you.
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