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Original Writing:
The definition assignment was a major piece of work in Unit 1 and I chose to define the term, Boolean algebra, to first year Computer Science students with high school mathematical knowledge. I felt like this term is complex but very important for first year Computer Science students to master and is a concept that can greatly be applied in advanced Computer Science courses and future technology related careers. Originally, I had some trouble distinguishing the difference between parenthetical and sentence definitions and interpreted a parenthetical definition to be only describing the use of the term in the real world. Therefore, I ended up writing, what I felt to be, an incomplete parenthetical definition or basically two sentence definitions. I throughly enjoyed writing the expanded definition for Boolean algebra because I was able to learn some interesting facts, which I had no previous knowledge of, such as the etymology and history of the term through research. I also greatly improved my teaching skills and communication in writing by paying special attention to the clarity of my writing and avoiding the use of jargon. To avoid the use of jargon, I envisioned myself as a recent high school graduate and tried to not think of concepts from Computer Science courses I took at UBC.
Peer Review Process:
I found the peer review process to be an excellent learning experience. I had the pleasure to review Kevin Huang’s writing and quickly realized how similar our approach to writing the expanded definition was. He discussed the etymology, history and how Gel Electrophoresis works like myself and he also discussed the components and applications of Gel Electrophoresis, which I did not discuss but found to be extremely helpful in learning about Gel Electrophoresis. His explanations were very organized and detailed that I was able to quickly understand the process of Gel Electrophoresis even though I have no background in biology and never took a biology class since high school science. The visuals he used were also extremely helpful and were explained in a lot more detail than the visuals in my own work. Reviewing Kevin’s work taught me that having small paragraphs split into many different sections is a much better approach to writing than having one or two long paragraphs of information. This approach is a lot easier for readers to find exactly what they want to know about the defined term and not have to reread to understand certain points of the definition.
Editing Process:
My peer reviewer, Kevin Huang, gave me some excellent and detailed constructive criticism on my writing which allowed me to easily spot and fix my errors in a short amount of time. Firstly, Kevin respectfully pointed me in the right direction of writing a parenthetical definition, which I had trouble with in my original writing. Kevin’s review also made me realize my tendency of writing run on sentences, for example, “Mathematical algebra and Boolean Algebra both have variables and are connected by some operator to make an expression but they have different rules in terms of the domain of the values assigned to variables and the different behaviours of the connecting operators in the expressions.” With his feedback I paid special attention to run on sentences when editing my writing and wrote shorter sentences while still getting all my points across to the reader. Thanks to Kevin’s review, I also realized that in my original writing, I was very focused on defining Boolean algebra that I had forgot to discuss the purpose of the definition.
Overall, this assignment was very enjoyable as I was able to discuss a technical term in my own field to others through my writing and not only improve my writing but research and learn more about a term in which I already have prior knowledge of. Looking at another persons writing also allowed me to realize my strengths and weaknesses in my writing and incorporate different ideas into my own writing while revising. Below, I have attached my revised definition of Boolean algebra and also Kevin’s review of my definition.