Madeline Fajardo

Professor Delmare

Writing for Engineers 

05/22/2021

Self-Reflection

    During the semester this course has taught me plentiful. I learned how my writing and language can affect my audience perspective. I think that this course has really given me lessons by showing me that with enough practice and feedback your work can get better, and your communication with the audience can be displayed more smoothly than ever before. 

The first assignment was the introductory letter, where we had to explain who we are and     what our goals for the class were. This letter allowed us to negotiate our own writing goals and audience expectations by making us explain who we are and what we plan on doing during the class. With the assignment we were able to convey our future plans to the professor where we also sought out to keep a formal tone since we were directing the paper at someone who has a higher title than us. The second assignment was a memo where we had to address a problem to a higher up. In the memo we were to design a problem and give our best solution. In this assignment we formulated and articulated a stance through our writing by standing by our best option to fix the problem and convince our audience why they should listen to us as well. We also engaged in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. We did this by expanding our writing. I have never written a memo before this class, and I don’t think of it’s just an assignment, but as a skill because you can use it in office, work or even school settings to address problems that are important to you. The third assignment consisted of research on a specific product, the technical description. In this assignment we strengthened our source use practices and also practiced using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources. We did this by citing our references and pictures from online. We learned how to caption pictures that we used and how to correctly cite them in APA writing, by doing research on our product online we learn to summarize and use it as back up to our claims to further prove to our audience that we are right. I think that these assignments really helped me grow as a writer because it challenged my way of writing in the sense that I haven’t done anything like what was shown and given to me in this course. What was most challenging for me was the rhetorical analysis because it’s hard focusing on words and how the author is trying to communicate without including what they are talking about. We had to speak on the language the author used without really including facts or really talking about the subject that is being addressed at all. I even resubmitted the rhetorical analysis and managed to fix some of the mistakes I made but not all. Something new I learned this year is that you need to think about many factors when you are writing anything at all. Who you are writing to or aiming your work at is a very big factor when developing your piece. That’s information that I’ll carry with me when I’m writing from now on, because you need to be aware of how you are communicating with your audience and make sure they understand what you are writing. Something new that I couldn’t do before that I can now is explain thoroughly when it is needed. I couldn’t really explain my thoughts too much before but having guidelines to help me remember what I should include in my work helps me do so. Areas where I still need improvement on are on transitioning in my own work, I like to get to the point in my assignments that my translations come out as being awkward or not really making sense. I would like my work to have more flow, that way it will be easier for my audience to really see what i’m trying to say. 

My first group project was the collaborative proposal, where I worked with three others. We had to come up with a way to improve a problem in today’s world. We came up with a way to hopefully stop the emission of CO2 by informing people that food also causes a lot of greenhouse gas emission. Although not everyone put in as much as they should have when it came to actually doing work, it showed me that working with others is not always ideal, it’s something I’ll have to deal with in real life. So I tried my hardest to put in effort and include others in ideas when I had any. We spent most of the time trying to see how we could explain our idea to others while also trying to be on time with work that is due. We usually had conferences with the professor during every class, which was helpful but we rarely had any questions because the work was always straightforward. 

In all, I think my writing habits have improved immensely thanks to this course. I used to wait until the day of when submitting assignments, and would receive horrible scores for the lack of effort in my work, but thankfully the guidelines & rubric in this class allows me to really pace myself when writing my work because it makes it easier on me and helps me write my best work. I usually plan my work ahead on time and try to pace out my assignment so it doesn’t build up toward the end or end up having to do it all on the last day, because that makes for rushed submissions that don’t help me in any type of way. I really think I picked up a lot of important skills thanks to this course and the assignments that were given. I do believe that all these skills will help me in the future when writing toward all different audiences.