My Journy Through This Class

When I enrolled in Writing for Engineering class, my expectations were that it was going to be another English class, similar to High School, except a little more writing. So, entering this class, I did not expect it to be very difficult. Over the assignment though, the class proved to be harder than I expected. This class had four major individual writing assignments: A Formal Letter of Introduction to the Professor, a Memorandum to the President of City College, A Lab Report Analysis and a Technical Description. Each of these assignments except the letter a reflection essay whose purpose review assignments and talk describe the assignment in terms of its genre, exigence, purpose, audience, and rhetorical situation.

For the Formal Letter of Introduction, I had to write a letter to the Professor about my major and career goals. I thought the assignment was easy and I will receive a decent grade, but to my surprise, I did not. When I thought why I did not receive the grade I expected, I realized that I did not have a writing process. Whenever I was assigned a piece of writing I would just jump right in and start typing on Google Docs, without putting much thought in or even making an outline. The result was poor writing that showed that I had no specific plan in mind into what I was writing. For example, in my thesis for the letter I wrote how I want to attain a well-rounded education by studying Computer Engineering and how I will benefit from the internships. But, when I was writing this I did not make an outline and therefore, I forgot to explain how internships can contribute to a well-rounded education. If I had jotted down the bullet points of all the things I wanted to talk about in the letter, I would not have for forgotten a major part of my thesis.

Although, I did not do well on the first assignment I learned that I had to change how I will write in the future. From that assignment on, I started writing an outline, essentially bullet points of what I want to include in my writings. This process greatly helped my assignments as they became more structured. All the ideas started flowing together smoothly and transitioned well into the next topic. For instance, the second assignment where I had to write a memo to the President of City College. I started by making an outline. I chose to write the outline as a to-do list format, where I would write all the things I want to achieve in a specific section of the memo and then write down what I would include to fullfil the task. This way I enhanced my strategies to draft a document, which is one of the Course Learning Outcomes for this class.

Another strategy I learned that helped me organize my writing was to make a T-chart to figure out the structure of my paper. This especially helped me write the Lab Report Analysis which was the third assignment where the task was to analyze, compare and contrast three published lab reports. The T-chart technique helped me put all the similarities and differences I found between the papers into one place. After that, it became easier to put the paper together. Fig1 image shows how I made a T-chart to organize the similarities and differences in the three lab reports I chose.

Fig 1 – T Chart

In this assignment, I practiced using various resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to writing projects, which is also one of the Course Learning Outcomes. This one will be especially important as in my future engineering studies, where I will need to do a lot of research and write lab reports on the studies I will do.

A final strategy I want to share that I found extremely helpful was making an outline using flashcards. For my fourth assignment which was the Technical Description, I had to write about a product of my choosing. I chose to write about Nike’s self-lacing shoes. For the parts, I made flashcards which included a short description of what the part is, the purpose of the part, and what function does it fulfill for the system as a whole. Doing so helped me achieve one of the Course Learning Outcome which states, “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing”. These flashcards helped me understand where I was standing and made sure that I knew enough about all the parts in the shoe and how everything works. Fig 2 image shows a few examples of the flash I made to help me with the Technical Description.

Fig 2 – Flashcard

In conclusion, one of the most important Course Learning Outcome I achieved in this course was to “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing and self-assessment”. Throughout all the assignments this is the one where I focused the most on. It did not matter what type of assignment it was, all of them included drafting, revising, editing and self-assessment. For each paper, I will always start by drafting it and then with the help of peer review, I would revise my paper and edit it to make the best version I could make. Once I handed in the assignment, each assignment followed a reflection essay whose task was to reflect upon the writing and what I accomplished. The reflection essay talked about the writing process for that specific assignments and described the essay in terms of things mentioned above.