In the past week, I am still continuing to learn, practice, and review my technical writing skills, especially in writing and revising the definitions of professional terms.
First of all, I learned how to define a term in various ways so that readers without a relevant professional background can learn about a new domain. The term I chose, Nostalgia, was a concept I learned in another class, and I read several papers before writing my definition to make sure I understood it well. However, the process of writing a definition was more difficult than I expected. Because I should not only consider how to provide a simple but clear and profound definition for my audience, who know nothing about this word but also try to write definitions for it through various methods. Finally, I explained Nostalgia in terms of Etymology, History, Negation, and Visual.
Secondly, through my partner’s definition of Closures, my knowledge of the computer science field was strengthened, because it was a knowledge That I hadn’t learned yet. As I read his definitions, I learned and absorbed many of the methods not used in my own definitions. For example, use a specific example to illustrate your terminology. I know it’s easy to think of, but I cared too much about explaining it in as many ways as possible, rather than explaining it clearly. My partner did a very good job of this, using a very clear and concise example to explain the rather complex terminology, which is very useful for enhancing understanding.
Finally, through peer review between me and my partner, we found out that we haven’t noticed some details in our writing and thus modified our definitions respectively. Through this process, I found that we should try to use simple and detailed definitions when explaining a relatively complex term to someone without a professional background. So, for example, when I am trying to explain the term Nostalgia, I should use more of a concept of psychology, because psychology is a discipline that relates to what’s in everyone’s mind. Thus more people can relate to my definition when I explain it this way. And when I used Visual, I didn’t pay attention to explaining the text that appeared on the graph, which might have confused my readers a little bit.
Here is my edited definition: