Feedback (entirely on the writing): The first goal when editing this should be to eliminate words from sentences. Use short and familiar words whenever possible. Change around a paragraph’s structure to get it shorter. Since this is for English class, cut out every bit of jargon you can. If there’s a length requirement, you can always fill it with story.
The best lesson of my dreadful college writing class was that nonfiction can have a story too—and the primary way you engage with a nontechnical audience is with this story. Solomonoff induction practically gets a character arc—the hope for a universal solution, the impotence at having to check every possible hypothesis, then being built back up by hard work and ancient wisdom to operate in the real world.
When you shift gears, e.g. to talk about science, you can make it easier on the reader by cutting technical explanations for historical or personal anecdotes. This only works once or twice per essay, though.
You can make your paragraphs more exciting. Rather than starting with “An issue similar in cause to separability is the idea of the frontier,” and then have the reader go in with the mindset that they have to hear about a definition (English professors hate reading about definitions), try to give the reader a very concise big-picture view of the idea and immediately move on to the exciting applications, which is where they’ll learn the concept.
Your essay was interesting. What did you think of a similar post I recently wrote?
Feedback (entirely on the writing): The first goal when editing this should be to eliminate words from sentences. Use short and familiar words whenever possible. Change around a paragraph’s structure to get it shorter. Since this is for English class, cut out every bit of jargon you can. If there’s a length requirement, you can always fill it with story.
The best lesson of my dreadful college writing class was that nonfiction can have a story too—and the primary way you engage with a nontechnical audience is with this story. Solomonoff induction practically gets a character arc—the hope for a universal solution, the impotence at having to check every possible hypothesis, then being built back up by hard work and ancient wisdom to operate in the real world.
When you shift gears, e.g. to talk about science, you can make it easier on the reader by cutting technical explanations for historical or personal anecdotes. This only works once or twice per essay, though.
You can make your paragraphs more exciting. Rather than starting with “An issue similar in cause to separability is the idea of the frontier,” and then have the reader go in with the mindset that they have to hear about a definition (English professors hate reading about definitions), try to give the reader a very concise big-picture view of the idea and immediately move on to the exciting applications, which is where they’ll learn the concept.
Thanks for the in-depth critique! I haven’t read your post yet, but it piqued my interest.
Also, moving on to the “exciting applications” isn’t very effective when there aren’t any. :I
Bah humbug.