This semester, the English class I took was English 210007, writing for engineers. This class, as the name implies, was focused on helping engineers develop their writing skills for use in the workplace. This class is rather important because many aspiring engineers overlook the importance of writing in their fields, and they brush it off and never bother to practice it. This class helped me realize how important writing is even as an engineer, and it helped me practice writing, as writing in the field of engineering is a lot different than writing I have done for previous classes. This class made me adopt new styles of writing and utilize the resources I had available to me in order to become an effective writer. I feel I learned a lot of crucial strategies that will help me through my career.
This first paper written for this class was the formal letter of introduction. This paper was quite simple as there was no new writing techniques, it was like a warm up exercise. All we had to do was write about our major and our goals both academic and career-wise. It was a good paper to start he semester and get into the habit of writing.
The second assignment for this class was a memo, which introduced a new writing style, one that would be more applicable in the real world than the others I have learned so far. In that paper we were tasked to write a memo to the president of CCNY, about a pressing issue with the campus that we had. Writing the memo made us really get used to focusing on writing for an audience, as we had to adapt to make sure our paper would be fit for the president to read. I enjoyed writing about the memo because I was able to talk about something that I was passionate about and develop a solution to it which was fun to do. The memo really taught me the importance of recognizing my audience as I failed to do so in the memo. It made me realize how crucial it is to write for your audience, otherwise your paper will fall flat. In the memo I did not include enough reasons as to why the president would care about the problem, which made my memo less effective than it could have been.
The next assignment for this class was a Lab report analysis, where we had to take three lab reports and analyze their structure. Finding three papers I wanted to analyze took some time, but with the help of CCNY’s online library, I found three I liked. I wrote my essay comparing three papers that discussed vitamin D in how it affected cancer incidence, pregnancy, and child growth. I chose these papers because they had similar topics, making it easy to compare between them. My audience for the paper was someone who knew about the subject and wanted to be able to understand the three papers I was reviewing without ever having to touch them. Similar to the memo feel I ended up neglecting my audience too much and just writing for myself. I failed to acknowledge who the reader was and constantly wrote as if the reader already knew about the papers I was reviewing. I found myself being very vague at times, not providing enough details from the papers making it hard for a reader to follow or understand what happened in the papers at all, which is something that needed improvement in my essay.
Reviewing the drafts of this paper with my peers and teacher helped me learn new writing processes. This is a new format of paper that I have never written before, so it was good to have other people there to help me understand the format. This assignment also helps me not only for this class but for a future engineering career as I will probably have to write papers like these in the future, and getting the experience now helps.
The fourth assignment for this class was a technical description, where we had to analyze multiple parts of a product and explain how they worked in the product. The product I chose was a Michelin tire. Writing this paper was rather difficult because there were not much in-depth descriptions to be made about the tire, so I focused a lot on how the tire was built while still explaining how each part works. Unlike the last two papers I feel like I understood my audience quite well on this paper. I chose for my audience to be a person stocking their stores with my product, so they had to know how my product worked and why they should buy it over other brands of tire. I explained the parts in depth and the process so the stocker would know how it works and why the tire is very good.
I think this report has helped me a lot in achieving the course learning outcomes. I have never written a technical description before, so it was interesting to shift my perspective and write on, as it had to be very formal, and as the name implies, technical. It helped me develop my rhetorical sensibility as I had to adapt to this new form of communication and a new audience. I had to reanalyze the genre I was writing in and tune my writing for that genre making it technical and straight to the point. A big factor in this paper was receiving feedback from my peers and professor, as I could learn more about how to write in this style and compare papers to improve on parts that were weak in my paper.
Overall, I feel like I have learned a lot and improved my writing skills with this class. All the assignments were new writing styles to me and they forced me to adapt and learn new styles of writing. I learned a lot whether it be through my own research and revision, taking advice from peers and my teacher or through classes and the textbook and I feel more prepared fc or writing as an engineer.
