The first unit of English 301 had a steep learning curve. It is not necessarily a difficult course, but I am used to writing stories – not typing out technical writing. That said, I am learning a lot about technical writing and I am enjoying the process of writing for business. Moving ahead in this course, I look forward to learning how to write a formal report. Below are my reflections of the unit one definitions assignment, critiquing process, editing process, and what I learned. Attached you will also find the edited version of my definitions assignment.
The Writing Process:
The writing process for the definition assignment was fairly straight forward once I figured out the right word to define. “Fetch” is a term that mostly people who work on the water or students in oceanography or ecology would know, so it seemed like a good fit for the assignment. Defining it in a way that someone who does not work in that field would understand was fairly easy, although upon reflection, I feel like I may have made my definition too simple. People complete PhD’s on fetch, such as those listed in the bibliography of my assignment, and to oversimplify that term is not giving them enough credit for the conditions that fetch has. I suppose that if I had made the definition more complex though, it would ruin the point of parenthetical and sentence definitions.
Sean Chan’s Critique Of My Assignment:
Sean Chan’s critique of my definition assignment was generally positive. His one critique was that the diagram that I used should have a bi-directional arrow. The nature of fetch is that it is caused by wind in one constant direction, as stated in my sentence definition, so I could not agree with that critique.
The Editing Process:
Due to the fact that Sean did not understand my diagram, when I edited my definition assignment, I changed the diagram that I used. The new diagram is more complex, but the descriptions of the arrows in the diagram better describe fetch than those in my last submission of the assignment. I also updated the references to show the source for the new diagram.
My Critique Of Sean Chan’s Assignment:
I have to admit that I am a tough critic. Compared to the singular critique on the diagram that Sean made of my assignment, my critique of his assignment looks rather harsh. My critiques were on his grammar, his word choice, his visual, his citations, and his format. Looking back at my critique, I still standby what I wrote because his original assignment needs some work. Sean is capable though. His final copy of the definitions assignment will undoubtedly be much more polished.
What I learned:
I learned that definitions can be quite useful in business documents but that jargon should not be used if at all possible. It also makes sense that there are different expansion strategies for definitions because not everyone will understand a definition with just a diagram, or just an a sentence definition. I did not understand Sean Chan’s definition of “trading algorithm” until I saw his diagram, which makes sense because I am a highly visual learner. Likewise he did not understand the diagram that I used, but he understood the words that I wrote, so he possibly learns well from reading.