Throughout this course, I was able to pick up several skills and gain a new understanding of the significance that writing still holds in engineering. I personally would not hold my writing skills as one of my strong attributes, but Writing for Engineering provided me with new insights into the many different strategies there are to writing, specifically in the field of engineering. I noticed that writing in the field of engineering requires a strict sense of direction and an understanding of what is required in order to provide the clearest possible version of the piece of any writing piece. None of the writing assignments throughout this course shared the same required set of skills as they varied from personal styles of writing to researching and detailed analysis, so each assignment carried its own challenges. Although writing is not my strong suit, I am more capable than before of producing a decent writing piece in the field of engineering. 

One of the first assignments in this course was the letter formal letter of introduction in which we had to create a properly formatted letter to our professor in which we introduced ourselves, our current major, and where we see ourselves in the future of this career path. I was able to properly introduce myself as well as the goals I had set for myself during my college experience as part of the engineering major. I use the course learning outcome of formulating and articulating a stance through and in my writing in order to express my views of how I see engineering in the far future. My stance was that careers in engineering will remain abundant in the future always in need of more people with even bigger and brighter ideas that will change the way we live.

The product review essay required us to create an honest and detailed regarding a product of our choice. This assignment required additional research aside from just personal experience as we also needed to look further into the company the product originated from. Only through peer review was I able to identify my mistakes and improve the quality of my writing piece. I gained feedback stating that my writing was not specific enough to cover certain areas of the criteria such as my criterion for an efficient belt being too vague or not being specific enough about the brand that the product I focused on was from. These mistakes defeated the purpose of the paper, which was to review a specific item from a specific brand. I now understand how to take a more detailed approach to conveying the purpose of my writing. I began revising my work in more detail and using the criteria to pinpoint the sections in which my writing covered that required information. I figured that the language I utilized for my criterion needed to be more specific while also allowing me to create an explanation that made sense for the reader and toward the purpose of the paper as a whole. Enhancing my revision strategy allowed me to look out for small mistakes and pay more attention to details when it came to describing my product and its criteria for being an efficient one.  

The lab report analysis essay required us to choose three research report essays that needed to cover different studies revolved around the same topic of our choosing and analyze them to verify how effectively they conveyed their studies through their report. Not only was a careful sense of research needed but also the skills to analyze the different components that made up the report. I received feedback regarding the lack of connection between the three research papers I analyzed. Turns out I was leaning more towards summarizing the reports rather than deeply analyzing them taking into consideration the criteria for an effective lab report. The essay was not finished unless I was able to state and prove how each one of the reports was effective or not. I gained a better understanding of how I should go about analyzing the lab reports, which was to focus on the structure of each individual subsection, break them down, and figure out whether or not they’ve covered every detail necessary for the audience to grasp the concept it is covering. I engaged in genre analysis when analyzing the three lab reports I had chosen for my LRA. Genre analysis allowed me to fully grasp the concept that each report was trying to convey and prove by breaking down the writing. When breaking down the writing, per sub-sections, I was able to gain a better understanding of what each paragraph contributed to the report, whether it was result analysis, a set of procedures, or discussions regarding the hypothesis.

The technical description essay required us to create a writing piece that analyzed every aspect of any technical innovation we could find at home to explain each component from the outer to the inner layer. During the duration of the technical description essay, I learned the techniques necessary to provide a detailed description of my item which was a coffee machine. To get more technical with a description, a deeper look into the item was necessary, which meant breaking down from the outside all the way into the inside. I learned that every aspect of the item needed to be analyzed and mentioned in the description which I failed to do with the dimensions, color, and shape of the item. These mistakes would ruin the informational aspect of the essay as the audience is not getting the full details. During the duration of this artifact, I was able to discover the audience’s expectations of the information I was providing. A technical description requires a detailed explanation of the physical and technical aspects of an item, so missing any piece of the item can alter the reliability of your information as it is not complete. The audience is expecting to obtain full descriptive knowledge of the item as it is the main reason why they are reading the paper in the first place. 

Our last assignment consisted of a group project in which we came up with an innovation that had not been invented before and researched all the aspects that would turn this innovation into reality. Once we had gathered all of the components to create a business from this idea, we had to create a presentation to sell our product and have people invest in it. Looking back at this artifact I learned that the presentation needed a lot of work regarding emphasizing the main points of our draft. A more adequate presentation does not include paragraphs but rather main ideas like summarizing an entire paragraph in just one sentence or phrase while we sell the product through our own dialogue. The audience’s expectation is a clean and direct presentation of what our product(Adaptive Tires) has to bring to the table. The main purpose is to capture the audience’s attention by getting straight to the point of how our product will work and why it would improve that aspect of their daily lives, in this case, it would be the driving experience.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.