Monthly Archives: June 2021

LinkedIn Practice

In this unit, I learned the key elements of making a professional LinkedIn profile. I conducted my own research on best LinkedIn practices and summarize them into ten key points. Also, I have studied my peers’ work on this topic, which helped me further improve my LinkedIn profile. For example, at the very beginning, it could be overwhelming for us to reach out to professionals that we are not familiar with on LinkedIn. As I and many of my peers found out, searching for our alumni in the early stage of expanding our professional network is very beneficial and effective. Such common background among alumni is more likely to help us build a closer connection. Another important lesson that I learned from this assignment is that we should use all available functions on LinkedIn to showcase our skills and further enhance our career prosperity, such as profile picture, summary, education, recommendations, skills, endorsement, etc.

Brainstorm and prepare report proposal

At first, it was not easy to brainstorm ideas for the formal report. I reflected on my previous research experience on waste management. No matter where we are on this planet, we are generating waste every day. How to deal with the large amount of waste we generate is a huge challenge. I believe this topic is very relevant to our life. The next challenge I was facing is to determine the scale of the report: a country? a province? Or a city? I noticed that the previous report topics that were listed in the instructor’s communication particularly focused on a smaller scale, such as UBC campus, UBC student residence, etc. Therefore, I decided to focus my study on one particular city that I have done research about. Once determine the topic and scale, the structure of the rest of the report was easy to come up with.

Review of my peer’s proposal

In this section, I reviewed Yusen’s proposal on protecting takeout food from being damaged by animals. I am amazed by the selection of such an interesting topic, which is relevant to the current event, COVID-19, and focused on our local community, UBC student residence. Furthermore, Yusen mentioned that he lived on the first floor of the student residence, where he witnessed the phenomenon that the “stolen” takeout food was frequently eaten by animals. This proves that when we try to brainstorm the research topic, strong observation skills would help us easily identify the issues in our daily life.

Peer Review Process

The most important thing that I learned from reviewing my peers’ work is that the intended audience is an essential part of our report. In my first draft, I did not include the intended audience which could cause confusion among readers on who is the expected audience of this report. After reviewing my peers’ proposals, I not only learned the significance of listing the intended audience in the proposal but also learned how to select the targeted audience. For example, in Yusen’s proposal, he particularly selected the manager of MD residence as the intended audience, rather than the manager of UBC student housing. That perfectly matches the scope of his research focus, Marine Drive Student residence.

I am amazed by the creativity and the strong observation skills that my peers presented. Many of my teammates have focused on the impact that COVID-19 brings, which is pretty up-to-date and relevant to our daily life. For instance, Yusen has focused on the increasing amount of takeout food due to COVID-19 and lockdown.

And finally, I found the peer review very important and necessary for my writing. It not only helps correct some errors of my initial draft but also provides me with some unique and fresh perspectives. From the review that I received from Yusen, he shared his thoughts on my research topic. Specifically, he made a very interesting point that “No matter incineration, composting or landfill, the greenhouse gas would be created. The key point is reuse some products in waste, so that we do not need to waste energy to create them again”. This helps me realize the need of clarifying the greenhouse gas emissions by different waste treatment methods and the limitation on the recycle and reuse. Although I do not think that I will cover this point in my proposal, I believe that I should address this in the introduction section of my formal report.

Overall, unit 2 was fun and a little bit intense. I like my research topic. Let’s see how it goes.

Links:

Link to my revised proposal.

Link to the review that I received from Yusen.

Link to my report outline.

Original Writing:
This is my first time writing definitions in technical writing. Firstly, it took me some time to choose a relatively complex and interesting term. I eventually chose to write definitions of TFSA, as it is exposed to our daily life but many of us may not totally understand its definition. Next, I determined the situation and the audience, which I believe is the key component of drafting definitions. By clearly identifying the situation and the audience’s expectations, I, as the writer, was able to make definitions that are easy for the audience to understand. Lastly, for composing the three definitions, I found the textbook a pretty useful guide, from which I was able to differentiate between parenthetical, sentence, and expanded definitions, and learn various ways to expand a definition. Overall, I learned the significance of identifying the situation and audience before making any definitions.

Peer Review:
I found the peer review highly useful, which actually put me in the position of a reader in practice. I enjoyed my time reading Vikram’s definitions of Historiography, as they were clearly defined to perfectly meet the designated situation and the audience’s expectations. By reading my peer’s work, I learned a lot from their expansion strategies while making the expanded definitions. For instance, Vikram smoothly employed a flow chart to illustrate the historians’ interactions with evidence and narratives, which effectively explains how Historiography works. More importantly, during the process of peer review, I understood the necessity of peer review, which is to examine the integrity and completeness of our work in order to avoid any possible missing points and complement our work.

Editing process:
The revising process is really important for me to improve my previous work. Thanks to the detailed feedback from Vikram, I was able to find and revise some unclear points in my definitions. More specifically, I added some descriptive words to the visual I attached. Meanwhile, I further explained some exceptional cases in my definitions to avoid possible confusion. Revisiting my previous work with feedback from peers would truly enable me to think from a fresh perspective and show me a clear direction for further improvement.

In summary, I enjoyed my study journey in this course so far. I had the chance to know my peers and learn their approach to composing and expanding definitions. More importantly, I truly appreciate the peer review process, where I received valuable feedback from my peer and meanwhile shared my thought on his work as well.

Here are the links to my work:
Original writing
Peer review
Revised writing