Since high school, I’ve always had a passion for creative writing. I enjoyed writing poetry, short stories, and anything that allowed me to express my feelings and fantasies onto the paper. The words were the paint on my paintbrush; I could use any colour I like, with the help of a handy thesaurus. Then came the four years in psychology, which drilled academic writing into my head. I could write very scientific papers, full of technical terms and jargons targeted for my psychology professors and fellow psychology majors. So learning technical communications in English 301 is like learning a new language, one that adapts to the targeted readers. In computer programming, we often start with writing a program that prints “Hello World!” onto the screen. In English 301, we started with writing a technical definition for audiences outside of the field. The definitions assignment was a great start to a journey in writing with conciseness and with the reader in mind.
Writing the definition
The process of writing the definitions was difficult for several reasons. Because I have more experience in academic and creative writing, I tend towards using more complex, ‘fancy’ words. While I was writing the definitions, I found myself itching for a thesaurus so that my choice of words was not plain and repetitive. The definitions assignment is very helpful by forcing me to write in a more concise manner and to keep in mind of the audience’s reading comfort. Also, there were some facts that I did not know about Integrated development environments (IDEs) prior to the assignment, so I had to search for external resources. The resources I found about IDEs are written in a technical manner, and I had difficulty trying to understand and paraphrase the concepts in a simpler way for the assignment. My struggle to decipher these sources puts me in the perspective of my potential audience, and how uncomfortable it might be for them to read my writing if it wasn’t written in a concise manner. In a way, I learned from the ‘mistakes’ of these resources.
I found the textbook very useful in that it suggests topics to write about when defining a concept. Particularly, I found that comparing and contrasting IDEs to concepts that the audience already understand (i.e., Microsoft Word and WordPad) really helps in explaining how IDEs work. Without the textbook’s instructions on how to write expanded definitions, I would struggle to make IDEs understandable to my readers.
Peer review
I was very impressed with how YeJi kept her sentences simple and short, which made for an easy read. After reading her assignment, I realized I can make further improvements in keeping my writing concise. I was glad that the textbook addressed the issue of unintentionally offending the peer whose work you are reviewing, and discussed ways to make the review more acceptable. Still, I was concerned about offering too many recommendations to YeJi. I found it helpful to look at other students’ peer reviews to decide on an appropriate amount of suggestions. I learned that while critiquing someone’s work can be easy, the difficulty lies in trying not to offend them.
Self-editing
YeJi’s peer review on my assignment was extremely helpful. She pointed out some jargons that I did not realize were jargons, such as the terms ‘debug’ and ‘compile’. This reminded me how easy it is to forget what other people might not understand when you are writing about your topic of interest. In the end, I decided to omit these jargons from my definitions altogether because it was nearly impossible to find other ways to paraphrase it without straying away from the definition for IDE. For example, I removed the word ‘compile’, because I decided that readers don’t need to know that program codes need to be ‘compiled’ first before they can be executed.
Yeji also warned that the first part of IDE’s history is disconnected from the rest, and suggest more flow in describing history. I struggled to rewrite it because the history of computers is very technical and complicated. I had difficulty in describing the primitive computer-like machines without calling them computers. The process of editing the history section gave me practice in describing technical concepts in a simpler manner.
Word Document for the Edited Definitions Assignment: ENGL301 Three Definitions Assignment
Link to the Peer Review Report: http://engl301.arts.ubc.ca/2016/09/28/peer-review-report-of-assignment-13-for-yeji-an/