Throughout the process of writing, giving and receiving feedback via peer review, and revising, I learnt about how easy it is to miss subtle syntactic and grammatical features in your first draft, particularly when striving to compose one’s writing in a professional tone.
I noticed there were a few instances in my first draft where I was not as concise as I could have been, and left room for ambiguity. This was particularly apparent when writing the sentence definition of my term, gerrymandering, which resulted in a hard-to-follow, run-on sentence. Given its complex nature, the term did feel difficult to summarise in a single sentence, but I managed to cut out unnecessary aspects of the term’s description to help make the meaning clearer in my revised version.
I also now have a better appreciation of how taking time away from your own work, before coming back to it, allows you to detach from ‘being the writer’, and view it with a more objective lens. When I returned to revise my work, I was no longer reading it as my own work, but just as an anonymous piece of work that I was there to edit. This made it easier to see solutions to make my definitions clearer staring back at me in plain sight, as I was no longer wrapped up in the mindset of ‘these are my words, and I need to make sure the writing style I choose reflects me’.
I found incorporating a visual aid, like diagrams with arrows in my case, highly useful to provide the step-by-step explanation of a term, like gerrymandering. The linear layout of the diagrams helped to dramatically simplify what could be a confusing process if it was merely described in a paragraph. I think supplementing written definitions with illustrations or diagrams is a very good way to be clearer, as many people are more accustomed to visual learning.
Peer-reviewing others’ works was fascinating, too, because it allowed me to see how group members’ thought processes differed in the way they approached this assignment. While each of us took a different route, we arrived at a similar destination, and each of our final products feels like a succinct and professional definition of the term we chose. I enjoyed learning from their posts, gained inspiration, and was consistently struck by the succinct and well-crafted quality of writing, for the most part.
All in all, I learnt a lot from every component of this assignment, and was engaged by the process. It felt like a good training ground for a professional environment, where one must make the final, executive call on how to revise their writing – even if they can ask for advice.