I thought that working on this exercise provided really valuable experience in writing to many different types of audiences. I know that in the future there will be plenty of times where we have to write to readers who are not in the same field so the perspective I gained from writing the definition and doing the peer review will be useful.
The word I chose is actually a subject that I am very familiar with. During my internship, I spent a majority of my time trying to improve the scalability of the product I was working on. I have a lot of practical experience and I have a good understanding of what scalability means but putting it formally into words was actually quite difficult. I found myself having to reference other sources and see how other people defined scalability which turned out to be a really good learning experience. As I was researching, I was able to learn even more about the subject and while I didn’t include that sort of technical information in my definition, I was able to gain an even deeper understanding of scalability.
Giving feedback also proved to be quite interesting. The word my partner choose to define is one that I had never heard of before so I was in the same perspective as a reader who needed to read and understand the definition. The definition was overall very well written and I only had to provide comments on some things I wanted my partner to add to make the definition more clear. Doing this peer feedback also helped me to think about what I needed to do to help a reader who has zero technical knowledge of the subject I am writing about. Even things as simple as properly labeling the diagram or adding the origin of the word could help information click in the reader’s brain.
My partner also provided me with good insight on my writing as he pointed out things that I hadn’t realized while I was writing the definition. I had used some ambiguous vocabulary while defining tolerance of bad scalability and by using his advice, I was able to improve my definition and make the ideas sound more logical. My partner brought up an interesting question regarding what are some characteristics that make a good system scalable. That got me really thinking about how I could explain it in a way that is easy for a non-technical audience to understand. Eventually, I decided to not include it as a good explanation would be too technical and it would be outside the scope of the definition. But it was a really good point and it made me really realize how difficult it is to write to different types of audiences who have differing backgrounds.