Organizing my thoughts into a string of words has always been a struggle to me, therefore I avoid it as much as I can. However, it is a crucial part for engineers in communicating their ideas to others. As a reader, writer, and critical thinker I have learned new ways to deal with my writing struggles throughout this semester. Towards the beginning, I did not have a theory of writing, but with assignments from the Letter of Introduction to the Final Proposal, I have improved.
The Letter of Introduction was the first piece of writing we were assigned. The objective was to write a professional letter about my life experiences to your professor. One of the first things I struggled with was writing in a formal tone. I want to create a friendly tone in my writing but I don’t want to overstep the boundary between an informal and formal tone. I believe it differs from each professor and how they interact with their students. Therefore, I decided to discuss my personal experiences and thoughts openly in the letter. I was content with the final product because of the freedom we were given to write about with an open mind.
The Technical Description assignment was one I did not get to complete. I participated in the brainstorming session and conducted research. However, I got sidetracked and did not come back to it. When we were doing our first freewrite, I was confused on what to write about exactly and felt like I was writing irrelevant things on my paper. I soon came to realize that comparing my content to someone else’s in a negative manner is not productive. Instead, I thought about their different approaches and incorporated that into my notes. I learned to work on my paper much earlier than usual. I gave up later on, but I regretted it so from now on I will complete the work.
The next assignment was the most difficult for me, the Rhetorical Analysis of a Lab Report. As I mentioned in my reflection, I had trouble navigating websites such as the CCNY library and Jstor. At last, I found technical reports while looking through different engineering databases. Since reports are open for the public to read, I assumed it was going to be an easy read. Many statistics were confusing to understand because I felt like so many numbers were being thrown at me. For the future, I will conduct more research around that topic to fully comprehend every sentence. One method that I found convenient was the brainstorm process I utilized. After the freewrite, I made an outline while I took notes on the reading. Then, I read the report one more time. Finally, I wrote my paper while unanimously rereading the report and utilizing my notes.
The second to last assignment was a group project where we had to propose an innovation in both a written paper and a verbal presentation. The time constraint clashed with other work that we had been doing, therefore I believe we didn’t reach out full potential. My group and I could have communicated more efficiently by expressing their thoughts in the moment and actively participating in the conversation. In addition, I felt the research I conducted was lacking depth and/or detail. For future references, I will always have at least 2 people revise my work. One person being someone from class and the second person being an outsider. Both will help me understand what I am lacking and bring in a different perspective. I admired how realistically we were thinking of this product and how we were thinking about future plans as well. It taught me to look at projects and papers as a long term factor instead of something I want to get over with.
All factors considered, my theory of writing was enhanced over the course of this spring semester in Writing for Engineers. Originally, I was unaware how this class would incorporate engineering in writing and feared what to expect. Overtime, I grew comfortable in the process of writing an engineering based paper. For example, I learned whenever I feel overwhelmed with a bigger piece of writing to break it down into smaller bits and really dissect it before jumping into the final output. Furthermore, collaboration is a crucial part in writing. This semester I did not reach out to my peers or professor often enough to receive constructive criticism regarding my work. For future references, I will take what I learned in this class and be productive about it in my other classes that require writing.
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