I can’t believe that today is February 1st and the first unit of Technical Writing is already over! We have covered a lot of ground in the month since term began. The major assignment of unit one was to write three different definitions of a relatively complex term from our area of academic expertise. Being a Political Science major, I chose to define the term “critical theory.” I soon discovered that the assignment was not as simple as I had initially thought. It was difficult to explain the term for a non-expert audience, especially because critical theory is so deeply bound to other theories and concepts in Political Science. Creating a concise definition that would adequately describe what the term meant was certainly a challenge.
My initial definition was fine, but needed some improvement. I was fortunate to receive good constructive criticism on my assignment from my teammate JM, which you can access here. He suggested that my definition had a good base but had room for improvement, particularly in terms of making it more accessible for a non-expert audience. To do this I simply added more content and context to the definition, making it clearer for the reader how critical theory functions as a theory. I also labelled the image that I had selected to ensure that the reader understood its relevance to the topic. Through doing this, I learned that making a piece of writing simpler to read is the best way to reach a larger audience and properly communicate the writer’s purpose.
When critiquing JM’s work, I focused on the relevance of the content he had included in his definition. While he suggested that I expand on my definition further, I suggested that he cut fairly large pieces of his. Though his work was overall very strong, the definition lost focus somewhat towards the end. It was interesting to look at the assignment from a reader’s perspective as it helped me to understand what the audience was looking for.