During the writing process for defining my chosen term, “algorithm”, it was challenging to phrase my sentences to help an audience that may not be in the same industry as myself. There are sometimes when I wished to use a term that the average would have found confusing and would have posed more questions than answers. Throughout the assignment I had to put myself into the audience’s shoes and try to flesh my knowledge of the term out of my mind.
The biggest issue I had during writing my definition was that I did not expand on new concepts very well. I would say something like, “there exists more optimal algorithms”, but I did not elaborate or give an example of a situation where a better algorithm existed. The reader may be curious how a more optimal algorithm compares to a less optimal one, and I need to take that into consideration during any technical writing.
In the process of peer reviews, I feel that I can add more encouraging words to help the person being reviewed not become discouraged and possibly ignore the suggestions. When reading my peer’s review of my definitions I felt more motivated to edit and take in his suggestions, but I did not feel that way in my own peer review of someone else. In future peer reviews I’m going to improve on this aspect to be more uplifting while giving good feedback.