I have been using LinkedIn since 2012, but I never really looked at some of the details carefully enough until I became a student of English 301. For example, I missed the opportunity to unitize the summary section of my LinkedIn profile to come across as professional and personable. With the help of English 301 curriculum, and peer review from my writing group, I was able to come up with a much better summary.

In regards to my final report proposal, I think I have a much clearer understanding now. I have always been passionate in building web technologies, and being able to help the less fortunate community groups with my skill set brings me a lot of joy. I did struggle with defining the audience and significance of my report. After much though and deliberation, I decided to focus my report on what I can accomplish instead of what I hope to accomplish. With that being said, I am confident that I would be able to deliver primary data collection in the forms of surveys and interviews, and gather data to recommend technical specifications for a successful online digital media marketing campaign.

I enjoyed the peer review process for this unit. My partner, Luke, is an excellent writer. I provided some critical feedbacks about his writing style as I wish him to further refine his writing style.  Being a Computer Science student, I can relate to Luke’s struggles of finding layman terms for conveying technical concepts. It is something we all have to constantly work on in order to keep the audience engaged. From Luke’s review, I learned that some times I come across vague in my writing style. I need to state my thought more specifically, and I will continue to work on that for the rest of this term.

Formal Report Proposal

Peer Review of Jenny Lian’s Research Proposal by Luke Zhang

Jenny’s Definitions RewriteMy First Draft

For this assignment, I chose the word “driver”, which is a commonly used word in the field of Software Engineering. I programmed a lot of drivers during my internship at Ericsson, and learned what “drivers” are beyond the Computer Science curriculum. I thought it would be a good exercise to try and define drivers to my fellow students. I followed our textbook’s instructions on how to write parenthetical, sentence, and expanded definitions. I tried formulating my sentence definitions several times as I find “driver” a bit hard to distinguish from other computer software. After struggling for some time, I asked a friend what he thought “drivers” were and realized that for a non-computer science student, the examples of software can have a wide spectrum (from iPhone apps to a vending machine). I was then able to formulate a sentence definition that can uniquely define “drivers” from a programming perspective.

The Peer Review Process/Editing Process

My teammate, Lisa, provided me with some feedback for me to improve on my writing. Since I always enjoyed reading Lisa’s blog posts, I was very receptive of her criticisms. Lisa had a lot of positive things to say and was very encouraging. For instance, she thought my paper was well organized and easy to read. In addition to positive feedbacks, Lisa also provided constructive criticisms on how to write with minimal grammar mistakes – reading it out loud. After reading Lisa’s feedback, I read my paper out loud and noticed a couple of grammar mistakes. I was very happy to learn this technique as I quickly fixed all the grammar mistakes I spotted. One thing that I contemplated about was Lisa’s suggestion about “low-level” software. She thought that many readers might not know what “low-level” software is. Although I agree with her, but I think that a sentence definition needs to be short and concise. I decided not modify my sentence definition for now, but to explain my thoughts further with the expanded definitions.

What Have I Learned

I learned that I tend to write as I think. Writing is like thinking out loud for me. As a result of this habit, I tend to omit words in my writing or not pay enough attention to subject verb agreements. It is very good idea to read my writing out loud to myself and to have a friend read it. I also learned that Lisa is a very strong writer. She has a firm understanding of English grammar and is very detail oriented. After reading her review, I have learned new writing techniques. I am very appreciative of having such peer-reviews through English 301 to learn from each other.

Jenny’s Definitions (Refined)

Peer Review (by Lisa Wong)