Unit 1 Reflection: Definitions and Peer Review
Now that Unit One is over, it’s time to reflect on the major assignments that we have worked on! I’m going to talk about my writing process, how it was for me to peer review a group member’s work, and how I went about editing my own work based on another group member’s review.
For writing the definitions for Unit One, I learned quite a bit about definitions that I wasn’t consciously aware of until now. Reading through the textbook about the different types of definitions, I realized that although I had encountered parenthetical, sentence, and expanded definitions before, I wasn’t fully aware about how they were used and how they address audience and situations. The expanded definition was especially helpful since I learned about different methods to describe a concept.
For my assignment, I chose to try and make shorter sentences and provide multiple examples in my definitions. I think this was a good idea since the concept of polymers can be confusing to some people and I wanted to give relate-able examples that the audience would easily understand. That also why I chose etymology and my visual aids so it would give a better representation of what a polymer is. I also found it difficult at times to avoid jargon in definitions, which is something I take for granted when looking at definitions in chemistry that assumes you understand certain terms.
During the peer review process, I learned that I can be very critical. During the process I read my group member’s definitions several and wrote down a lot about what I thought and what I thought could be adjusted or changed. However, from reading my colleague’s definitions, I’ve learned that people in this class are very proficient in their writing. My group members seem to be very concise and do well with avoiding grammatical and punctuation errors, and I can actually use their writing as a base for that. Sometimes it seems that most people have longer sentences though.
After seeing the peer review of my definitions assignment, I realized that I tend to glance over my documents when I write them, because I did have some minor sentence and grammatical errors in my post. This is something that I plan to improve through the rest of this course by rereading my documents carefully several times. Going through the editing I have also noticed that although I aimed for shorter sentences, many of them were actually very long or even run-on. This is something I want to improve on and an ongoing problem I seem to have. As well, defining additional jargon in my post as well as context seems to be something I need to work on. In short, I learned that I need to proofread my documents more carefully and to better consider my audience rather than assume that they understand certain things.
Below is the revised definitions documents and a link to the peer review of my assignment if you want to take a look. I’m looking forward to the next unit and thank you for reading!
