Critical Analysis One: Achieving a Readable Style

Writing clearly and effectively are key aspects of communicating your ideas to your targeted audience. Technical reports, especially, require a writing style and prose that is a bit more nuanced than your average article. In addition to conveying your point clearly, you must supply technical details that could potentially obfuscate the core thesis of your report, especially to the layman. Writers Daniel Lynch and Jeffrey Terrace, in my opinion, succeed in conveying their core point in an effective and interesting manner, and their interspersed use of technical details (such as graphs) contribute in helping the reader understand their point or purpose.

In Content Conditioning and Distribution for Dynamic Virtual Worlds by Jeffrey Terrace, the author discusses a method for dynamically rendering 3D multiplayer worlds that are scalable in size and shape. The Sirikata research initiative is a unique and creative attempt to program a system for enabling new and interesting types of applications and solving the problems associated with creating a metaverse within the contraints of today's resources. Terrace sieves his essay into clearly divided sections and subsections. In each of these, he starts off by explaining the core concepts and principles, then moves on to the more intricate subtleties that require clarification. For example, in the first section, Chaper 1: Introduction, he begins by explaining how the traditional 3D application is static that is, that users are constrained by pre-determined limitations. Later on, for instance in section 1.2, he outlines in greater detail exactly what these pre-determined limitations are, and how his solution , the Sirikata platform, will avoid these limitaitons using dynamically adapting algorithms to load and render data in a more progressive format. He uses graphs to further illustrate his point.

In The Art of Digial Publishing: A foundation of combined standards to support the future of publishing by Daniel Lynch, the author begins by outlining a perceived major problem that he wishes to solve: that technology is growing faster than the rate at which the educational system is evolving, and the distance between these two vital functions of our society needs to be reduced. Lynch's methods for alleviating these issues is through better communication tools through various mediums, aided by the use of computers especially. He mentions two standards specifically: HTML5 and TEX, both can be used to create things such as graphs and papers. TEX, and LATEX specifically, are used in the creation of textbooks. Before going into greater detail about these ideas, he begins by outlining the history of idea propagation, such as the creation of words themselves, to the invention of the printing press many centuries later.

Lynch does not utilize graphs and technical statistics as much as Jeffrey Terrace until later on, and I believe this hurts his article. While too many statistics can overwhelm and confuse, I found Terrace's use of them to be very effective and I would not have understood his point as clearly without them. In addition, I found that Terrace was a bit long-winded in conveying his points. While it is interesting to read about the history of communication in conveying ideas, I didn't think it was hugely necessary and was rather pointless in the grand scheme of the article. I think Lynch did succeed in explaining in detail his thesis. Some may prefer this method, but I would suggest to him to reduce his over-complication in favor of simplicity. I believe Terrace succeeded in being both simple but also very clear. I would prefer if in future papers, he utilized visuals a bit more, especially when explaining concepts such as "level of detail" or the rendering of graphical faces. As a graphical designer, I understood these, but I feel that the average reader may not have (though I understand this was not necessarily written for the average reader). Overall however, I believe Terrace's paper to be the stronger one. His article was both more interesting and conveyed in an easier to understand manner, whereas Lynch's seemed to ramble near the start before going into motion.