With the semester days away from ending, this course has been very interesting and informative. There is a unique aspect of this course that I cannot really describe as this course was different from average English classes. We had to do 5 distinct assignments, all completely different from each other. These assignments would help build and shape my writing process, allowing me to grow and understand the expectations of an engineering student. I could look back to when I first started this course and see how clueless I was with writing. I barely understood any of the work given and was a challenge for me to catch up. Still, I completed my work in a timely fashion and accomplished some of the course learning outcomes we are expected to learn.

            When I began this course, I never really learned how to formally write to a person in a higher position than me. The Formal Letter of Introduction was the first assignment in which we receive a grade on and allowed us to not only learn about our classmates, but to address people formally as if it were a workplace. As for the Memo assignment, it really benefited me as it taught us to focus on what is known as the rhetorical situation. In all our writing assignments, we had to focus on the audience that would read our work, the genre, the motivation behind the writing, the relationship between the audience and I, and finally the purpose of our essays. This assignment was especially difficult for me as I needed to incorporate what I learned from the formal letter of introduction while researching a real-world problem. I had never received an assignment where I need to look for companies or budget needed to fix a simple problem within the college. Still, this assignment really forced me out of my comfort zone and allowed me to learn.

            The next assignments were the Lab Report Analysis, which I did not seem to learn much from. I understand the need to interpret what others want you to understand and analyzing papers isn’t something new for me. I did however, accomplished the Course Learning Outcome 7, which is “Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing” and 8 which is “Strengthen your source use practices”. This assignment did focus a lot on researching what papers I wanted to do and how they use the sources to their advantage when it came to writing. The fourth assignment is the Technical Description, which I consider as the most difficult yet fun assignment given. We could essentially choose whatever product to take apart and write a technical description on. I had never been allowed to disassemble anything and this experience was really fun. However, when it came to writing this description, I had to ensure that I understood my product and convey the information effectively to my audience. I had to make sure I got each part and that I explained their function as well. I struggled a lot with the explanation and was very time consuming when it came to researching and finding the write wording. Especially with a pandemic occurring outside, peer review was minimal and was hard critiquing my own work. Although it did allow me to learn CLOs 5, 6, 7, 8, I would not want to do this again.

            The final assignment that we done were the Proposal and the Presentation assignment. This assignment allowed our creative mind to run as we developed a solution to a problem. This assignment forced me to think realistically when it came to developing the solution. We had to think about budget, land, time, and all sorts of other variables when it came to a solution. Although this assignment did require a lot of thinking and planning, I really loved this assignment and hope I received a good grade on it. I did struggle a bit when it came to creating a budget as many sites did not list the exact cost of land and such, but it was still fun creating my own solution to a problem in the real world.

            Overall, these five assignments allowed me to develop my writing process and learn the Course Learning Outcomes required of me. It taught us to think deeper and to actually understand and analyze each other’s work to improve upon one other. We learned to self-critique, understand our flaws, and to build upon our writing to develop it. All in all, I believe I did grow a bit since the start of the semester and hope future courses teach me things I need in the future just like this course.

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