Learning to communicate professionally is challenging, yet important to successful writing. Through constructing parenthetical, sentence, and expanded definitions of a technical term that I am familiar with, I gained experience learning about each of these types of definition. The goal was to craft these three definitions for a non-technical audience. This assignment challenged me to consider the readers’ point of view in my professional writing and how I should adjust my writing to cater to them.
After constructing my three definitions, I received detailed and consctuctive feedback from Darius Zhang. During the assignment, I found it challenging to differentiate each of the definitions and write them in a way that caters to the needs of the audience. However, after feedback from Darius, I understood how to make my parenthetical, sentence and expanded definitions different from one another. By adding examples to the expanded defintion, it became more discriptive and easier for the non-technical audience to understand.
I found Darius’s definitions of “Dao” very informative. I was impressed by his poetic writing style and the engagement I felt reading his assignment. Despite his lovely writing technique, in certain areas, it is unprofessional when writing technical pieces such as this assignment. The overusage of direct quotations for example, made the definitions feel less personalized. Additionally, while Darius’ definitions were easy to understand, but get straight to the point, there were still some repetitiveness that may be cut out so that the writing is more conscise. While editing Darius’ work, I realized that his errors could have easily been made by myself. The editing process helped me become more aware of the areas of improvement I suggested for Darius and I hope to put my own advice into use in my own writing as well.
Overall, this assignment was helpful in teaching me a new writing technique that I never knew about before. The peer review process not only gave me editing experience of peer writing, it also helped me be more conscious of the possible errors I could make in my writing as well.