Unit One of ENGL 301 99A asked its students to get familiar with writing professional letters, emails, memos, and definitions. Through the application of various professional writing techniques, I have built my own blog up from scratch; formed a formal writing team; and created a definition document targeted for audiences who have no knowledge in my defined term’s area.
The definition assignment proved to be a challenge as I had to keep in mind at all times that I am writing a definition for an audience who has no knowledge of what I was explaining. By following the steps of explaining the terms using parenthetical definition, sentenced definition, then expanded definition, it made the process of defining the term easier as it was a building process – each definition had an added amount of information that made the explanation more detailed. What was also difficult was ensuring I wasn’t repeating myself by using the same words to define the term – replacing “sampling” with “selection” or “divided” in the explanations.
I found the peer review process to be of great help as I was able to learn from my peer’s writing techniques and styles. Barton’s definition assignment used a very direct and simple language to allow the audience to understand better which I felt was very helpful. By reading through the three definitions of Barton’s chosen term “absorption rate”, I had a pretty good idea what the term meant without any prior knowledge in real estate. Although Barton had missed out on a visual and a few expansion techniques in his own writing which I had reminded him of in the peer review, it also reminded me to revisit my own work to ensure I had fulfilled all the requirements for my definition. Overall, I believe the peer review process was beneficial to both parties and allowed us both to further improve our works.
The self-editing process was pretty straightforward thanks to Barton’s comments in the peer review. He specified clearly where I needed to improve my work which included clarifying whether or not stratified sampling is strictly for sociology only; correcting my works cited format; and adding a few more details in my expanded definition. Coming back to self-edit my work along with Barton’s recommendations, I was able to see the mistakes and details that I had missed out on before. The whole assignment, overall, was challenging as it put me in the shoes of an educator in a way, explaining a term to someone who has no prior knowledge in the related field. Unit One was a great introduction to the professional writing course and I look forward to learning and adopting more professional writing techniques in my future writing.
Attachment to my revised definition assignment: 301 – Jessica Lee – Assignment 1.3
Link to Barton’s peer review of my definition assignment: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2020wa/2020/10/05/assig-1-3-peer-review-stratified-sampling/