Paragraph Revision

Original:

In a similar sense, intelligence is a collaborative effort, as it is a sum of research and facts shared by the world and gathered to form understanding of various topics and fields. Lethem mentions Don Swanson’s work, which shed light on Raynaud’s syndrome solely through the collection and integration of various bits of information sprinkled across various scientific journals (223). Facts alone didn’t solve this problem, even though they were all present in some form, albeit separate. It was the intervention of Swanson, who put the facts together and used them to grasp an understanding of the topic that truly solved the issue. However, Swanson couldn’t call the work his own, since he did none of the research, he merely took other researcher’s works and melded them together to form a new understanding on a pre-existing topic. In this sense, this is a collaboration between Swanson and the researchers he gleamed information from. But at the same time, the “intelligence” that arose from this collaboration is a product of Swanson’s efforts, not the other researchers. The researchers only provided information for Swanson to use. By sorting these facts into a comprehensible format, Swanson brought “intelligence” out of the swarm of facts he collected. In a similar fashion, the AIs described in Johnson’s essay use a series of components that perform simple tasks and report to a single, higher up component which takes the input and then makes sense of the information (206-207). Ultimately, intelligence is composed of a bunch of assorted individual “intelligences,” and is “made” using an understanding of the components, assimilating the cacophony of their voices into a coherent message.

Revised:

In a similar sense, intelligence is a collaborative effort, as it is a sum of research and facts shared by the world and gathered to form understanding of various topics and fields. Lethem mentions Don Swanson’s work, which shed light on Raynaud’s syndrome solely through the collection and integration of various bits of information sprinkled across various scientific journals (223). Facts alone didn’t solve this problem, even though they were all present in some form, albeit separate. It was the intervention of Swanson, who put the facts together and used them to grasp an understanding of the topic that truly solved the issue. However, Swanson cannot be solely credited for this discovery; he merely took other researcher’s works and melded them together to form a new understanding on a pre-existing topic. But Swanson was not altogether removed from the process. Swanson brought “intelligence” out of the swarm of facts he collected, acting as the “overseer” by bringing together the chaotic mess of information. In a similar fashion, the AIs described in Johnson’s essay use a series of components that perform simple tasks and report to a single, higher up component which takes the input and then makes sense of the information (206-207). Much like Swanson’s research, a sum is built using assembled components, many of which are unrelated and ignorant of each other, and are integrated together to create a working product. Ultimately, intelligence is composed of a bunch of assorted individual “intelligences,” and is “made” using an understanding of the components, assimilating the cacophony of their voices into a coherent message.

My paragraph suffered from ambiguous and contradictory wording about Swanson’s contribution, so I cleaned up the sentences to argue my point clearly. In addition, although my peer reviewers didn’t notice, my analysis of Johnson’s AI was a bit lacking and the connection between Swanson and the AI was not fully fleshed out. After contemplating for a bit, I realized my thesis was too broad, and decided to narrow it down a bit, using my revisions as a starting point. The main idea of this paragraph didn’t really change, but some of the connections my peer reviewers pointed out got me thinking of other places in my other paragraphs that could be modified or contained connections I hadn’t realized before. Since my essay isn’t finished yet, I’m still not sure how or where this will exactly fit into my thesis, or even if I’ve completely finished revising it, but this paragraph definitely will help in arguing some aspect of my thesis.