Hi! My name is Cindy. This is my digital portfolio- a record of all major assignments completed in the Writing for Engineers in the Spring of 2023 at the City College of New York. We are starting with the Self-Assessment. Enjoy!
Cindy Zheng
The City College of New York
Writing for Engineering: ENGL 21007
Professor Jacobson
22 May 2023
At its core, I believe that writing will always be a form of art and communication, a versatile tool that can be wielded in a variety of different ways. Following my experiences this semester, my initial perceptions of writing have not changed. However, I do find that my perceptions of how writing can be utilized have broadened. For instance, I’ve always understood that writing professionally generally included writing with more concise and polite language, but there happens to be a lot more than that. I was not aware of the variety of different structural guidelines in writing reports nor was I experienced in writing for people of different backgrounds taking into consideration their education level and seniority levels at work. In this course, we had three major assignments which helped us understand how to write in different styles and implement different research tactics.
The three major assignments were the lab report analysis, technical description, and project proposal. Before I go in-depth about how those assignments have helped me in achieving the course learning objectives, I will explain the general gist of what each assignment entailed. Both the lab report and the technical description was individual assignment, and the project proposal was a group assignment of four students. For the lab report, I was responsible for choosing two published lab reports and comparing them to each other in terms of lab report structure guidelines. In the technical description, I was responsible for picking an object that could be shown in an exploded view diagram and then giving a brief explanation of the history of the object, explaining its benefits, parts, and its use. Lastly, for the project proposal the group was responsible for coming up with an innovative idea; making the design, writing a technical description for it, and creating a business proposal for it. In the following paragraphs, I will delve into how these assignments have impacted the course learning objectives and helped broaden my understanding of how writing can be used.
The first-course learning objective was to “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” I am interpreting this objective as the ability to collaborate in peer reviews and group collaborations to give and receive feedback on our first drafts. I believe that I have fully achieved the course learning objective due to the multiple peer review sessions we had to do for each assignment this semester. Two assignments where this learning objective truly showed were the technical description and the lab report. During the review session for the lab report, I hadn’t completed my first draft because I was quite meticulous about which reports to use and even haven chose two reports to analyze, I was still unsure if I had chosen the right reports because they were lacking in terms of experiments and statistical data. However, that uncertainty was absolved after the peer review session where my peers advised me to rechoose my reports to have more well-rounded analyses and to be conscious of not using too technical language in the analysis. Then for the technical description, I was able to show a fully written first draft which helped in showcasing a writing style that was different from my peers which allowed me to provide more structured feedback to my peers. For instance, in my technical description, I had included the history behind my object (the rice cooker) and its benefits of it since its development as well as a table of contents that helped readers understand what they would be seeing. Using my first draft as a reference, I was able to point out what was lacking in the other drafts shared by my peers.
The second learning objective was to “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment” which is to work on improving our strategies for those skills. Writing just like any other skill needs constant improvement. A good practice we implemented throughout this semester was to take part in peer reviews which improved our skills for reading, revising, and editing by analyzing our peer’s works and providing them with relevant feedback to improve their work. Then with the comments provided from peer review, we had to write up a final draft which improved our skills in drafting and self-assessment because we had to reanalyze our quality of work after integrating the feedback. A good example of how peer review helped me improve those skills was the peer review for the lab report analysis where after receiving feedback and viewing the drafts of my classmates, I had completely rewritten my first draft with new lab reports. After finishing the first draft, I had then enlisted the help of a friend who had no connection to the class to read over my draft to get unbiased feedback. Following the feedback, I made more edits, rewrote certain paragraphs, and then had the draft reread before finalizing it as a final draft. In past English classes, I didn’t quite go through as many revisions so the assignments this semester pushed me in terms of setting the bar higher for how many revisions I should be doing because I realized that my final drafts were always better than my first drafts and substantially got better the more feedback, I got for it.
The third learning object is quite similar to chefs customizing their dishes to their customers’ palettes, being able to negotiate your writing goals and audience expectations is something all writers must consider while writing. The third learning objective just does that; it explores the ability of writers to be able to understand to cater their writing to different audiences. When writing it is necessary to understand our target audience, who we are writing for. For instance, depending on the audience we would have to use strictly academic language and integrate more facts. If it is for a more informal audience or to be targeted towards younger generations then the writing would have more recent cultural references and be more colloquial. This learning objective was most strongly shown in my lab report analysis where I had written the whole report while trying the maintain the most professional tone in the essay as I could with Professor Jacobson and faculty in mind as the audience. Not only, did I take into consideration of their position at the City College of New York, but also their professional experiences, and schooling. For instance, to my understanding, Professor Jacobson has taught this course multiple times, therefore she has an understanding of what to expect from a lab report analysis. Therefore, it is my duty as the writer to write to the standard that I believe the audience is looking forward to.
A writer, like a chef in the kitchen, must have the ability or the want to nurture said the ability to create mutually collaborative environments for fellow peers and colleagues to work together. I felt that I achieved this learning objective. As previously mentioned, I took part in multiple peer review sessions which allowed me to get more comfortable with working virtually with my peers. The project proposal was the main reason why I felt that I achieved learning objective four. Working with my groupmates allowed me to experience a high diversity of working and writing styles which facilitated increased group collaboration and communication. Additionally, this course learning object can also be related to learning objective two, where I had the pleasure of getting to know my peers, receive, and providing critical feedback for the betterment of our written works.
On the track of making analogies with how chefs subject themselves to new cuisines, cooking methods, and other skill development practices, writers also take part in experimenting with and using different writing styles and learning or coming up with ways to improve their writing. The fifth learning objective is the practice of learning and using different writing practices to better our writing skills. I felt that I had satisfied this objective. I feel that through the lab report and technical description, I was able to experience different kind ways of presenting and analyzing information which enable me to expand my understanding of how writing can be utilized. One major skill that I got to learn this semester was learning APA formatting. Before this class, I had mainly used MLA. I am quite glad to get to know how to use APA because it’s used by professionals in social sciences while MLA is for arts and humanities. Without the practice of using APA, I would have probably continued to use MLA which isn’t very suitable for my intended career in business and technology. Like course learning objective five, course learning object six which is to “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing,” I had developed more effective methods to create a stance through my writing which is through the creation of a thorough outline and more than adequate research and annotations to support my arguments. One assignment that I felt embodied this was the lab report analysis. I felt that my stance was stronger in that assignment than the other more technical assignments due to the meticulous amount of time spent researching and annotating the lab reports based on modern lab report guidelines.
With all three assignments, I will confidently say that I satisfied course learning objective seven which is to “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects” as well as course learning objective eight which is to “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).” One assignment that embodied both of those objectives is the project proposal. From the start of our project, my group and I used the Internet to help us understand our innovation which is to create a modular system to track rodents throughout private residential properties and businesses. Another way that I have achieved those two objectives is the research I had done for the lab report analysis where I utilized the Academic OneFile and Academic Search Complete to look for materials for the analysis. Having access to many databases allows me to learn how to effectively research for materials I like to use through certain keywords and to avoid using long sentences when searching for specific material within the databases.
All in all, this course has allowed me to further understand what it means to write technically. Having the three major assignments allowed me to experiment with different styles which with no doubt will help me in the long run when I need to make reports and communicate with other professionals.
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