The following reflection aims to critically analyze my performance and progress over the past semester, as pertains to the core learning outcomes of ENGL210007 “Writing for Engineers.” I will briefly describe my prior experience in writing and where I found myself at the start of this course. Next, I will devote some time to my experience participating in class discussion, completing individual assignments, what I learned, and where I felt I could do better. Ultimately, I will illustrate how I was able to learn and improve overall.

I came to this class with little in the way of training for technical writing. While my prior experience in English studies was generally positive, it took place some time ago, and largely in the context of social sciences, which often have different objectives and conventions than writing for engineers.

For example, in prior coursework, often one of the prescribed assumptions was that the reader was a fellow academic, initiated to some extent in the field of study, and perhaps familiar with the subject material. The opposite is often true in technical writing, however. This was a recurring theme highlighted in our textbook, that the quality of technical writing was typically contingent upon one’s ability to effectively “translate” technically complex ideas for an uninitiated audience (Gross et al., 2019, p. 1).

This was a key insight highlighted by Prof. Delamare in review of my first draft of our “Technical Description” assignment. The professor suggested adding a glossary component to the paper, which serves to aid assimilation of technical terms and concepts without interrupting the flow of the document. Adding this feature to the document extended the approachability of a technical piece to a broader readership. This was a major takeaway for me, as a principle for writing, that a little consideration of one’s audience goes a long way to making it accessible to a broader readership and increasing its overall utility.

I brought my own set of assumptions and objectives to the course. In particular, my personal goal at the outset was to become better acquainted with structural and rhetorical conventions of technical research. This was my purpose in continuing studies, as outlined in “Letter of Introduction” (Franklin, 2019, para. 4). I was pleased to find that, as a class, we were exposed to a variety of practical applications for multimodal technical writing, and allowed guided practice in these areas, including the area of technical research.

For example, our topics of study extended to the genre of business communication, including such things as email etiquette and practical tips for texting (Gross et al., 2019, p. 6-8). We brought this knowledge to bear in our “Memo” assignment, and I found room to improve here. My first draft was expository in nature and lacked a persuasive “ask,” which to some extent misses the point of a memo, which is to articulate a position and win over the reader. Prof. Delamare encouraged me to “finalize with a brief persuasive paragraph” which was indeed the magic ingredient, turning an informational piece into a call to action. This broad exposure and emphasis on real-world applications resonated with me and, I suspect, helped me grow as a writer.

Another theme in our study was linguistic variation. I found this to be one of the more interesting aspects of the course, as linguistic diversity and its interplay with culture flavors much of the depth and breadth of language itself. For example, the notion of low and high context cultures which was introduced in our textbook by way of a YouTube video by Erin Meyer, illustrates how sensitivity to differing patterns of communication can go a long way to aiding understanding in a variety of media, including writing (Gross et al., 2019, p. 212).

I found this was relevant in participating in class discussion, as I had the privilege of interacting with many bright students, both in the online forums and in-person, with a variety of backgrounds and communication styles. I found many of us naturally took on some aspects of each other’s speech and writing style, meeting in the middle, as it were.

By way of example, however simplistic, a fellow student I met in the online forums emoted more clearly in their writing than I usually did, through the use of interjections and exclamation points. I noticed that such features served to make the tone of their writing unambiguously friendly and positive, and found myself mimicking this tone in reply. I imagine this sort of practice served to develop my rhetorical sensibility, both in writing and communication in general, and gave me a strong platform for collaborative work and social writing.

Collaboration became a critical aspect of our study in our “Group Proposal” assignment, which entailed both a technical research paper and a presentation. This was my favorite piece, not only because it checked the proverbial box that I mention above as a personal goal, but also because it allowed me to work on a project with a team. I was lucky to be paired with two sociable and clever students in our group, “Mr. Robot.” We meshed quickly and were able to move ahead with our assignments without trouble.

With some consideration, I suspect a key element that made our collaboration easy and fluid was the fact that our goal was to succeed as a team, rather than just as individuals. This was illustrated in a variety of ways, such as checking in with each other regularly, providing status updates, or sending little reminders when one of us might have forgotten an assignment was due. It might be a simplistic illustration, but I think this “all of us or none of us” approach solidified our team-oriented approach to assignments, and ultimately proved effective for us. This taught me valuable lessons that I will carry to future collaborative work.

Another way in which I was able to grow in this course was in the use of source material, particularly in regards to paraphrasing and synthesis. In these ways, as those mentioned above, I found the conventions for genres of technical research and analysis differed from my prior experience, and characterized technical writing as slightly less expository and more goal-oriented. This idea became important in the “Rhetorical Analysis” assignment, where my instincts were often to directly quote passages from the original research subject rather than paraphrase and synthesize.

For example, in an early draft of this paper I was highlighting the importance of one of the authors’ methodological choices, to involve visually impaired users in the planning and execution phases of their study (Franklin, Rhetorical, 2019, p. 4). My first draft included a block quote from the original paper, wherein the authors stressed the importance of this strategy. I found this section of my paper became much more concise and effective when I reduced this block to a single quoted phrase followed by a brief synthesis of their paragraph: “That is to say, those with vision, such as the researchers in this paper, will have a difficult time guessing the struggles and needs of those without” (ibid.).

Conversely to some of the other genre-specific forms and conventions outlined above, I found that the use of library resources, online databases, and sources on the internet, mostly aligned with my prior experience in academic writing. The library database portal access and search process was quite similar to what I was familiar with, although the databases I found relevant to my writing skewed more toward applications in engineering and traditional sciences. Regardless, I found this practice was quite useful, as I discovered additional journals and sources relevant to my research outside this course, and I am confident this improved my research ability overall. Similarly, I suspect my writing habits, particularly in regards to reading, drafting, editing, etc., were mostly solidified prior to this class. That said, in more specific, methodological aspects, such as the ingestion and composition of technical research, I am confident that I improved.

As mentioned above, my favorite piece overall was the “Group Proposal” assignment. My least favorite activity might have been our analysis and discussion of Melissa Marshal’s TED talk, “Talk Nerdy to Me.” I found the subject informative and entertaining but thought some of her claims were somewhat overwrought, even problematic. Without getting too far into the weeds on this, some of her suggestions sounded vaguely anti-intellectual to me, especially in regards to the blanket ban on lists which she claims will “kill your presentation,” or prohibition of mildly “science-y” words like spaciotemporal. To be clear, this was not an uninformative assignment by any stretch, just my least favorite.

I found the area in which I could still use improvement is the proper use of APA style. As with other writing style guides, the rules can be fairly nuanced and require a certain amount of practice to implement intuitively. My prior experience with APA was passing, in some statistics and quantitative analysis courses in Political Science, and I believe I will need more practice before I am as comfortable with it as I am with regard to MLA.

On the other hand, the area in which I think I improved the most was in adopting better technique for negotiating my own goals in writing against audience expectations. As mentioned previously, I found a number of our assignments sharpened my ability to formulate and argue a position in a persuasive manner by reaching audience members where they were at rather than expecting them to come my way.

Altogether, I took away a lot from this course in many regards. For example, as highlighted above, I was able to become better acquainted with the research process, and the accompanying structural and stylistic conventions. Similarly, as mentioned before, I had a great experience interacting and collaborating with my fellow students, and think this will make future collaboration a more familiar exercise. While there remain areas in which I am certain I could still improve, as described above by way of examples from my assignments, I can chart my progress throughout the course in most of our learning outcomes. I appreciate the effort everyone put into this course, including the professor and my fellow students, and I look forward to future opportunities to use what I have learned.