The definition exercise was an enlightening experience and a helpful guide to understand my shortcoming and my strengths in first drafts. The edits of my colleague also helped me refine my editing eye and what I should look out for in future assignments.
The original piece surrounded a definition of a concept in artificial intelligence, a topic I am pursuing in depth in one of my current classes. It is always hard to convey technical algorithm information especially to casual readers. I think one of my larger successes, as it was pointed out by my reviewer, was simplifying the information and organizing it in a coherent fashion. My challenges were including in-text citations rather than just lumping sources together in the bibliography, not properly defining an audience and some sparse syntax and grammar errors. With this knowledge thoughtfully brought up by my reviewer, I can apply extra caution in my future technical communications. This is a key concept I have learned from this experience.
The process of peer reviewing was valuable as well. You can find my partner’s review of my work here. Both my partner and I brought different strengths to the table and they felt quite complimentary. My suggestions were anchored with language that prompts questions, such as “I wonder”, “this may”, and questions themselves while my colleague offered tangible corrections such as offering a sentence to replace one of mine. They are two different styles and I believe they both raise the quality of our work. I chose this style for two reasons. First, when I think of my experience in theatre, I have always found the best directors to be ones who ask questions of their actors rather than direct them specifically about how their lines should be read. This way, they can stay authentic to their version of characters. I believe the same is applicable in writing. Identifying the issue and asking someone how they would address it encourages them to do so in their voice. Second, beyond maintaining agency over the words, it also keeps things positive. I am a big fan of saying “how can we do this better” rather than a strict “don’t do this.”
The editing process was a fairly expedite process. Given such tangible directions, I was able to modify things quickly. I fixed my outlined challenges. For the feedback that had exact sentence replacement, I used some but left out others to remain authentic to my voice and the things I was trying to say. I think it is incredibly to be able to listen to other’s feedback and parse it properly. The second edit gave me the opportunity to learn how to do so. You can see my revisions in my second version here.
Overall, the three steps of this process taught me various strategies to raise the quality of my own work as well as my partner’s work. I believe I will be able to apply these for future assignments.