Peer Review for Zhuoming (by Zhao Hong)

Zhuoming’s essay started off with a funnel introduction, whereby he begins with a general sentence about the topic. Subsequently, each following sentence becomes narrowing onto the topic until the last sentence which states the main point of the whole essay.

Zhuoming seems to have some difficulties expressing his thoughts through writing due to his inconsistent sentences. Some of the sentences are not comprehensible as well. This problem might be due to direct translation from the Chinese language to English language.

I realized that this essay is off topic due to the fact that it is not related to either one of the Writing Assignment 1’s questions. On the other hand, there is unity in each paragraph stating each factor contributing to Global Warming. In addition, the reasons and suggested solutions of each factor are stated at the end of each paragraph.

Due to the lack of expression usage to link the gap between the paragraphs, it gives the impression that the paragraphs are not related to each other. On the other hand, he did a good job in using a lot of transition signals such as ‘however’ and ‘but’.

The conclusion of this essay ends with a question, “If we are doing the same thing day by day, how could we expect a different result?” This is an effective ending because it probes the readers to think about how they can change their daily lifestyles to alleviate the factors contributing to Global Warming.

summary about yuheng's draft1 review(liang jiayue)

firstly,yuheng's draft 1 has very clear outline: lead negotiator for Copenhagen summit should be a great diplomat, a strong lead and a scientist.
secondly,paragraphs are well connected and the questions asked in the beginning of each paragraph are very good to attract the audience's attractions.
thirdly,good examples are given for each main point in body paragraphs. fourthly,very clear and straight forward thesis statement and topic sentences for the article.
there are also some places that should be improved or focused on:
it should be better if you could ass some of your own comments on the article or give some of your ideas that is different from the opinions of the author, or else, give some deeper arguments in the last paragraph(the summarizing paragraph).
then,it should be better if you could make some of the sentences shorter using punctuations.
lastly,try to apply APA in your essay would be a better choice.
as a whole,yuheng's essay is quite a good one.

Summary of ZhaoHong's first draft (by ZhuoMing)

This draft is very clear: in the introduction, in the last sentence, he points out all five thsis statement, namely, economic, politic, corruption, employment and security reasons of the failure of Gobenhagon Conference. And each of the reasons makes a paragraph, the five paragraghs make the body of the passage. Two things need to say, the first is that in the five paragraghs there is only one real example(the indonisia one), more detailed facts need to be added to make the discussion more vilad. The second is that more expressions need to be added between the paragraphs to link paragraphs, as I have seen, there is only one, namely,"last but not least"(at the beginning of the sixth paragraph). And the conclusion is paraphrase of the thesis statement(And it also did call actions), which, again, makes the whole passage very clear and in good order.
Last but not least, at least one reference needs to be added.
Best Regards
ZhuoMing

Peer review(post by Song Yuheng)

After reading Jiayue’s essay I find there are some good points in the article. Firstly the article uses a question to raise the topic. Secondly the structure is clear. There are thesis statement, body and conclusion. Thirdly the arguments are good. They are demonstrated step by step and are very persuadable. Finally there is a transitional paragraph between the thesis statement and the body. This makes the article more coherent.
However there are also some defects in the article. First of all the transitional paragraph seems too long. Maybe she should make it shorter. The second thing is that there can be more specific examples such as some research results or some data. At last APA should be applied to the quotation parts and a list of reference should be added at the end of the article.
To sum up it is a good article with clear structure, good arguments and so on talking about ways of solving global warming problem. Just a little amendment is needed.

comment by ZhuoMing

(by zhuoming)
I am so surprised that jiayue comment on both Zhaohong and Yuheng, so I am commenting on jiayue's comment first. A good point in jiayue's comment is that she compared the two passage, which makes it easier for us to see the respective advantages of each passage. Her comparasion is in series, which creats points to points comparasions, rather than point to point comparation. An advantage os this is that it indicates readers what are the respective outline and main ideas of each auther and it makes the comparasion clear. After the comparation, she gives some suggestions to each author, which are quite practical. finally, she gives her point to summary and end her comment.
For me, as the two summaries are already compared quite completely by jiayue, I just want to give some suggestions for writting a summary. For this summary, I think a good way to organize is to make a comparasion as jiayue.
I am not saying this because comparasion is a good form for passage, I am saying this because there is a lot to compara between the two lecturers, one is more formal and scientific while the other is easier to understand and related to our daily life, and the difference in their contents makes their characters of speech different, one is more serious while the other is more humorous. So if we write our summary in a comparasion style, maybe it would be easier for readers to get a clear outline of the whole lecture and really remenber something and put them in our real life, but their summaries are already very good, I am just giving some suggestions, which are inspired by jiayue.
A little long, thanks for reading and welcome commenting on my comment!

PS: I still upload my comment as I did the day before yesterday, so I have to write again and post my comment.

Summary on the Friday’s lecture

Summary on the Friday’s lecture
By Song yuheng
On the Friday’s lecture the two speakers, Dr. Shie-Yui Liong and Dr. Benjamin. K Sovacool, gave us their presentation on climate change.
The first lecturer, Dr Liong, defined climate as an average of weather over a long time. Then he emphasized that despite a little greenhouse gas was necessary too much greenhouse gas was bad. He also illustrated some kinds of greenhouse gas and showed that the climate was becoming warmer and warmer. After that he introduced IPCC(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and some of the work they have done. At last he showed us that we could downscale the output of GCMs to match the hydrology needs.
The second lecturer, Dr. Sovacool focused on the facts of the condition of climate change and the solution of climate change in terms of both institutions and individuals. He illustrated that most of greenhouse gas was from fossil fuels and other sources and most of emission due to energy supply and use. He also showed the top ten emission countries among which China and the US ranked at the first and second place. Then he showed the institutional actions of climate stabilization in terms of sector, energy supply, transport, building, industry, agriculture, forests and waste management. In addition he laid out some individual actions of climate stabilization in terms of electricity, food, homes and technology. Finally he gave us some advises on what we ourselves could do to make a difference on climate change.

Friday Evening Talk on Climate Change (by Lim Zhao Hong)

The talk for this evening is related to the major problem that everyone on Earth is facing, i.e. Climate Change. We were honored to have two speakers from reputable backgrounds for this evening. They were Dr Shie-Yui Liong and Dr Benjamin Sovacool.

Dr Liong gave a brief introduction to climate change and modeling. He defined the term climate as an average of weather over a long period of time (in this case, we are talking about 10 or 20 years).

He further explained that the main factor which causes climate change is greenhouse effect. Greenhouse effect is essential for heating up the earth for the survival of all living things. Without heat, Earth would become an extremely cold planet without any inhabitants. However, if the level of greenhouse effect increases, the earth will gradually become hotter and to a point of time where it is too hot to survive.

The emission of greenhouse gases plays a main role in greenhouse effect. Research has revealed that the emission of these gases is resulted from human activities such as burning of fossil fuels and agriculture. Dr Liong emphasized on carbon dioxide gas as it represents 74% of the total amount of greenhouse gases. With the usage of a graph, Dr Liong showed us how the percentage of carbon dioxide had increased from past centuries till now.

At the last portion of his presentation, Dr Liong introduced the IPCC to us. IPCC was established in 1988 by WMO and UNEP. The IPCC synthesis report involves the temperature and rising sea level expected after the stabilization of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The second part of the talk is presented by Dr Benjamin Sovacool. Dr Benjamin gave us a brief overview of the climate change conundrum and presented the institutional solutions to climate change. Some of the examples of sectors included are energy supply, transport, buildings, waste management agriculture and forestry. The examples of policies and measures for these sectors are reduction of fossil fuel subsidies, limit driving days, certification and building codes, renewable energy incentives and financial incentives to increase forest areas.

With the help of graphs, he commented that China, United States of America and Indonesia are the top three contributors of greenhouse gases. According to a chart which displayed the per capita carbon footprints for various countries, Dr Benjamin gave an analytical comment that the higher the income average of a country, the higher the amount of carbon dioxide emission will be generated from that country.

Dr Benjamin concluded his presentation by encouraging us as individuals to play a part in climate stabilization. He commented that if everyone started to make a difference, the change will be significant in global context.