Memo Self Reflection

            With roughly a month passing by since the start of the semester, this English course has been very informative and work heavy compared to the previous English classes I have taken. What is most unique about this course is the corporate like feeling when it comes to assignments, deadlines, and the topics discussed in class. Unlike with other courses, there are penalties with late work, realistic assignments that can be used in the real world, and many topics I must put effort into for me to understand the course. Especially now with the first graded assignment completed in this course, I am slowly getting the picture of what is expected of me in this class and acknowledge that I still have a lot to learn when it comes to writing.

            The first topic I wanted to address was how effective peer review has been for me. In my previous classes, peer reviews were often just compliments given to each other with the occasional grammar fixes. However, this style of peer review in this class was very different for me as I was critiqued quite harshly compared to my previous experiences. With the critiques, I was able to fix mistakes, rethink how I wanted to word my thoughts, and even explore new ideas that were given to me. I believe that the grade I received in this memo could not have been this high without the help of my peer review group and hope that future assignments would have a similar revision process.

            Moving on to my struggles or weaknesses in this assignment, I believe I had the most trouble wording the data found and supporting my claims with evidence in a formal way. I understood that I needed to address the audience formally since I was writing to the president of CCNY, but I felt that I lacked in the way where I can effectively present evidence without sounding informal. An example from my writing was when I needed to prove that there were risks involved in squeaking escalators. Although I did manage to list methods in which the audience can look up news articles about my topic, it feels informal and lacking in a business setting.

            I also feel a lack of fulfillment in presenting my purpose of replacing the escalators. Whenever I wanted to propose a solution for the problem, there always seems like the response of “Why can’t I just repair it instead of buying a new one”, which defeats most of the arguments I could make. Due to this, I seem to have lacked confidence in further pushing on my reasons of replacing the escalators and resorted to agreeing with repairs instead. I want to improve upon this since my original motivation for choosing this topic was my personal feelings regarding the breaking of escalators. I genuinely felt fear when hearing the squeaks of old and unreliable escalators of the NAC building and wanted to address the possible liabilities to push for a solution. Hopefully, I could learn more about effectively putting my points out there and actually sound convincing.

            To conclude, this genre of writing doesn’t really suit me as I have never really written a memo before. However, by doing this assignment, I have realized that I have a lot to work on to improve upon my writing ability as well as my persuasive skills. There are also other minor weaknesses that were exposed such as giving up easily when it comes to pushing my points across and hopefully by sticking to this class, I will improve on my next assignment.

 

Lab Report Analysis Self-Reflection

            With the completion of the third paper for this English course, it marks the halfway point of the spring semester. This means we have learned nearly half of what we need for the “real world” and progress should begin to show in our work. Since dedicating nearly a month and a half on this class, I came to the realization of new habits beginning to develop in my writing process and problems I previously had are slowly being addressed within the class. Although I still make many mistakes, I feel that I have learned a lot thanks to the environment of the class and the overall supportive peer review groups I have been in. Hopefully, I continue to improve upon my work and achieve a high grade for the coming papers.

            Looking into the current paper the class just completed, it has been one of the most stressful projects we have done. In previous classes, the analysis is usually composed of a paragraph or two on the articles we read. This paper, however, felt much harder since we had to “assess” the reports we chose. What challenged me the most was comparing and contrasting each of the lab report while considering their audiences. For an example, one of the reports targeted scientists and researchers while another targeted the average reader. This creates a problem for me since one uses complex vocabulary while another has a more tone down approach. I cannot exactly grade one above another since their target audiences are different, yet I cannot ignore this difference. Since the objective of the report was to assess how well the reports were compared to one another, this problem was a pain to address and took me a while before being able to find the words to describe each report.

            Another problem was the grammar for my paper. Both the professor and me peers suggested that I visit the writing center to address this problem, but this topic is really hard for me to learn. I had trouble with grammar since learning the English language and the rules for grammar are difficult to memorize. I believe if I were to correct this problem, my grades would increase dramatically. I guess the only way is to continue beating these rules into me head until I learn how to apply them into my writing.

            As for the strengths within this paper, I believe the peer review was the most effective form of learning. Instead of having only one pair of eyes reading my paper, multiple people are reading and finding mistakes I might have missed in the drafting stage of the paper. They were able to critique my paper, giving suggestions such as changing tense or wording of different sections of my paper to more effectively present my argument. One example was when I used present tense when I should have used past tense. By allowing my peers to read my paper, I feel as if it has benefitted me greatly during my writing process of the paper.

            By sticking with this class, I have realized that there is a lot to work on before I can say that my paper is perfect. I have learned many different forms of writing such as memos or sending formal emails and hope to continue to learn more in the class. This paper in particular showed me multiple problems that I have such as grammar and to read from different perspectives. To approach these problems in the future, I hope to learn from the writing center and this class to improve and hopefully do well on the next assignment.

 

Technical Description Self Reflection

            With only a month left before the end of the semester, this English course has been very research heavy compared to the beginning of the semester. Especially with the transition from lecture style classes to distance learning, many tasks that were once simple seem to create problems for both the professor and the students. However, I still believe the uniqueness of the course remains. From the deadlines given and the group related working habits to the topics this class covers, it provides an experience that I usually don’t get in typical English classes. With the first fully online-class project completed, I am starting to understand what is expected of a typical engineer and the style of writing that comes with this profession.

            To start off, the purpose of this assignment for me was not only to inform the reader about an innovative invention, but to understand the style of writing a technical description needs. I have never written this genre, an technical description, before and experiencing this the first time, I can say it was extremely hard. Especially since we needed to consider the audience, which were other engineers and general readers, there were difficulties in writing formally and informatively yet simple enough for everyone to understand. I had to write countless drafts and revise my wording over and over just to create an explanation that I believe others would understand. I believe since this was the first time writing this, it motivated me to see how well I could write a description and what grade I received. Although I am not extremely happy with my grade, I am satisfied that I completed this task despite having no contact with my peer groups for revision yet received a decent grade. I believe my task to inform the reader using the technical description worked out well.

            Throughout this writing experience, what I struggled the most with was the revision aspect of the assignment. I am unsure if my groupmates dropped out of class or if I am just ignored, but there hasn’t been contact in over a month. This unfortunately means that there wasn’t anyone else correcting my drafts but my parents who are not native English speakers, my brother who struggles with English, and myself. There was also the problem involving the structure of the assignment. Since there wasn’t anyone I could contact or rely on to help me get through this assignment, I had to figure out the general layout of a technical description. This would affect me as my final paper apparently was missing a part or two. To fix these struggles in the future, I plan on researching the style of writing ahead of time to understand what is required and to work with the new peer review group that I have been placed into for revision and support.

            As for what helped during the writing process, I believe that since I had no one to support me this time, I have learned to be more self-reliant instead of focusing on others to help me. I found that by relying on others for the past half a year, it created a flaw for me whenever they weren’t around. Especially with the isolation due to the pandemic, I have to be more careful in the ways I write to minimize the mistakes I could make. I also found the readings that were provided very helpful in my writing process as they provided me the basic outline for this assignment. For the next assignment, I will be sure to read what is provided carefully so that I would understand the structure and what is required in the assignment.

            To conclude, the technical description has the most challenging style of writing I had to do for this semester. This was due to the new format and style in which we had to write as well as the struggles of finding a person to peer review my work and finding the general layout of the writing. Although it was challenging, I had learned a lot from being isolated from everyone and to be more self-reliant. For the next assignment, I will incorporate what I have learned as well as to look out for the struggles I had this time and attempt to eliminate them with the new peer group given to me.