I learned so much in the first opportunity I had to write and reflect on my own work. In this assignment, we were given the chance to define a term for our peers, using guidelines laid out in the textbook. We then provided advice on a peer’s work, and then used their advice to improve our own writing.
My original definitions benefited significantly through the peer-review and self-editing process. After making edits to my work based on a peer-review, I found that returning to improve the article over time made a big difference. I have collected some further reflections on the entire writing process.
Stage One: Writing
When writing my definitions, it was difficult to strike a balance between providing enough information for a novice reader, but also being concise. I was able to achieve this in the end, but only after many edits. After reading Krystina’s work, I believe she had a slightly different issue. She had trouble simplifying the language to adapt to her audience of a novice reader.
Through Krystina’s review, I learned that I had originally misunderstood the instructions for a parenthetical definition. This could have been avoided through a more careful review of the relevant content in the textbook.
Stage Two: Peer Review
The advice from the textbook regarding peer reviews was particularly helpful. I found I had to complete several drafts of my peer-review in order to make my tone supportive rather than judgemental. Maintaining a friendly tone while providing accurate critiques was not as easy as I had suspected!
It can also be difficult to see errors in expression in your own work, and a set of fresh eyes was beneficial when creating my definitions. There were still a few small mistakes, which Kyrstina was able to highlight and explain. This demonstrates the true importance of peer-review. At one point in my review of Krystina’s work, I was tempted to omit a minor mistake she had made in the interest of conciseness. After reading her review of my work, however, I realized that even these small edits are extremely important.
Stage Three: Self-editing
I saw the benefit of being extremely specific in what doesn’t work and why when it came to self-editing my own definitions. Krystina gave me extremely detailed instructions on what was unclear about my own work. For example, I needed to elaborate on a point I made about montage, my chosen term. I was able to further explain how it was used in Soviet Russia to begin building a vocabulary of film-related terms. This makes it more comprehensible to the reader.
After reading the relevant information in the ‘Technical Communication’ textbook, I made new edits to my definitions. I noticed that in my article, I used a large, bulky paragraph in the ‘Content’ section. These long paragraphs limit the readability of the webpage. Gurak and Lannon also suggest creating interesting, specific headings in the text. I changed my heading from ‘Introduction’ to ‘The Importance of a Good Definition’ for this reason. Finally, I increased the amount of white space in my article after learning how much it improves the visual appearance of the web page.
The three stages of this project were equally useful in creating a polished article in the end. Getting feedback from friends and then through Krystina as a team member helped me significantly. From large concerns I had about the content of my definition down to the sentence structure and word choice, getting criticism from true ‘novice’ readers was crucial. I look forward to more opportunities for peer-review in the future!
Please take a moment to review my updated definitions here:
301 Meredith Gillespie Peer Reviewed Definitions
Krystina’s review of my assignment can be found here.