Unit One Reflection Report
In this unit, I chose a technical term “network protocol” based on my academic and career interests and wrote the definitions of it in several different ways. Also, I read the definitions of many different terms from my teammates and partnered with Amy Yung in our team to peer review our definitions. During this experience, I have learned many good ways to explain a technical term to other people, also understood and corrected my mistakes during technical writing.
When writing the definitions, I tried my best to reduce the usage of jargons to make it easy to be understood by people without any computer science background. For example, I compared the network devises communication with human communication, and also provided many examples when introducing the key elements of network protocol. However, I haven’t realized that some people may even don’t understand the meaning of “byte” until Amy helped to point it out. To avoid confusion, I decided to remove the usage of “byte” and only mentioned a message in network protocol that may contain two parts. Moreover, to make the definition simple, I only included some very simple and general labels in the figure, while Amy suggested that I might also include some detail steps. Based on her suggestions, I tried to explain the three key elements of the network protocol in the figure, which makes it more meaningful and more related to the other part of the definitions. I believe my definitions improved a lot with Amy’s suggestion, thank her so much!
When I reviewed Amy’s definitions about honeypot, I noticed that she took many efforts on introducing the history and important milestones of the term, which make readers much easier to understand the background and origination of the interesting network security technology. However, I noticed that I felt a little confused when reading the history part since at that time I did not have a clear idea of what honeypot is. As a result, I gave her advice about reordering the 4 parts of her definition, and I also learned about the importance of the overall organization of an article. Besides, I noticed that Amy also made a similar mistake as mine by assuming people can understand the term “vulnerability” in computer science correctly, so I also suggested her to make a brief explanation about “vulnerability”.
By comparing the writing style of Amy and me, I noticed that we are focusing on different aspects. For example, her introduction about the etymology and history are quite impressive and helpful, while I tend to focus more on giving an example for every complex concept. I think in the future, I will also try to investigate and introduce more about history. Besides, although Amy and I focus on different areas, we are both computer science students, and I noticed that it may be a common mistake for computer science students to assume other people have already known about a technique during communication. I think in the future when discussing some technical problems with other people, I will try my best to make sure other people under the jargon I used.
Overall, I think the activities in Unit One is not only interesting but also beneficial to my writing skills.
Here is the word document of my revised definition
And here is the link to Amy’s peer review of my definition: