Mpansu Tunkara
Eng 202 fall 2022
Prof, Pamela Stemberg
December 18, 2022
Final Reflection Essay
I have learned a lot during the course which is about how to write a technical document to your peers, coworkers, or your management office. I never understood what technical writing was all about, I thought of it to be a course that would be involving engineering technology stuff since I am studying Electrical Engineering. But now I know that it’s about writing a document or able to present a proper document to your audience. The technical writing class helped me with my writing skills, it helped me to know what key points I should focus on and how to make people really interested to what I am talking about. The class made me understand what to do when writing something professional to my management department or to a peer that would make them understand the document that I am writing about.
The course was a little hard to understand in the beginning because I wasn’t a good writer at all. I always try to avoid writing classes but no matter how I would still have to face these classes. At first the class was a little easy to understand. I didn’t really understand how to write about the fast cheap and easy Assignment, in that assignment it was like a rolling dice because you must write to a management about something that is good for the company but also fast, cheap, and easy to help the company move forward. For example, let’s say your company didn’t hire as many people need for the job and the job or the project has a due date. if I was to write that to a company, I would be hard for me to explain it because at the same time we need the job to be done faster and then we need a stable budget to not cause to use too much money. That part of the assignment really threw me to the curb, but I was able to understand how to resolve a problem like that.
What I really learned from the fast cheap and easy assignment is that I will come to deal with a situation like this where there’s an issue at the work field that needs to be resolved immediately, but also in a professional way.
The main point I understood during this course is to know your audience, your audience is the people you’re trying to communicate with. The technical writing course helped me to understand how I should approach to my audience by understanding what kind of audience I must present to. To know that I must come with a strategy to know my audience and how to make them understand what I am trying to present to them. I always thought when my professor meant audience it’s like you’re doing a ted talk for a huge crowed That will be facing at you while you’re giving your speech. I understood that your audience is the people or the individual you are talking to, it could be a letter you’re writing to a company that you want to work for or a presentation that you want people to see and be interested about. What I understood about audience is know how to catch their attention by showing them things that would make them understand what you are trying to inform them about.
The drafting and proof reading is something I understood a lot during this course. There’s no way that a person could be so perfect to write a first draft essay and it would turn out to be good. There will always be errors and sentences that you would want to fix or remove, proof reading really helps with that. The strategy that I learned with this course was to always do drafting first, the drafting helped me to gather up information first and write down all the information I must be able to puzzle them together. Then you have the proof-reading method, this is very helpful during the course. The proof reading helped me to re-read my essay word for word, this help me understand that if it makes sense to myself while reading it then it would make sense to whoever else is going to read or listen to it. Editing is also good writing and essay; it helps you to rewrite a sentence or a word that would make it more understandable to your audience. The most important thing is to revise it with someone other than yourself and get feedbacks from them, just like the peer review that we did in class.
The peer review helped a lot during this it helped me understand that my practice with my surrounding would give me feedback that would help me do better on my writing skills. It’s always important to get feed back from your peers, it helps to bring up more ideas in your writing and know what to remove or add into it.
My definition essay was not great as I planned it took me about 3 hours to know what I was writing about and how I was to write about it. My definition was about a resistor, so I had to look up some information about a resistor I had to break it down to how it’s made and what does it do and the history of it. This was like the technical description where I would have to describe something and report about the background and the history of it and how it’s made. With my technical description I wrote about a multimeter which is an electrical tester. I had to struggle a little to get information through the internet because most of the time it leads you to Wikipedia, which most of the time the research there is not really accurate. The hostos library was a good resource to find information. The hostos library helped me to get good information about multimeters, I was able to know the history and the year of inventing.
The tough things I have had with this course is to write rhetorical lab report. Writing a lab report is something that you’ve gathered information about it and then you write about your results and calculation and conclusion. Although this lab report was a compare and contrast essay on two lab reports, this was hard for me because I had to look for two labs that different from each other but have the same 8 elements of a lab report. With this lab analysis I had to read both documents to know what they have similar methods and where they differenced at. It came many times where the labs didn’t really go with the lab report elements because it was not in order. I was able to understand the parts when I know the meaning of the 8 elements which I summited for my assignment.
My biggest struggle during the course is citation. Citations was a struggle for me but what I learned about citation is to avoid copyright which is also like plagiarism. Copy rights is asking the owner to use there work with the work you have but with writing plagiarism is avoided by giving the owner the credit they deserve for their hard work by citing the information bellow your easy. The citation was my main struggle when writing an essay, because most of time I don’t just take information from one specific place I usually browse around to get better information. I did get to understand why cited work is important. I learned that it would help the audience get better information from what you’ve presented, and it gives a big credit to the person that did the main research about it. To do citations the course taught me to write the persons name or university and the year it was publish on the internet.
My infographic presentation was about solar energy power, I was able to pick it up easily because it was like my major and I was able to get information about it. With the infographic I was able to bring up information, but I felt like it wasn’t enough information for audience. I did like the topic that I chose, and my main audience were to be homeowners and people that are into agriculture and gardening that would want to save money on power supply and for those who would want to use clean energy for a safe environment. The infographic is a chart or a bar graph that you would show information about what you’re presenting to your audience. The information would help convince or inform the audience, with my I did like the coloring and the information that was given under it.
Technical writing is not only about writing, but also about how to construct your writing in a professional way. With the technical writing course, I was able to build my writing skills I was able to understand that I was to write what my audience would understand and always start with drafting. With the drafting it helped me to give myself the time to just gather information on what I am about to write about and other ideas that I have in mind. Rereading was something that helped improve a lot on my writing which is called proofreading it helps to know the minor errors in your writing. I would now always have a second reader to any of my writing to get feedback from it. Feed backs made me understand that it could give out more ideas that would increase your writing skills.
This course really prepared me for my future career, specially when it comes to writing a cover letter to a new job. These techniques that I have learned during the course would help me improve more with my writing and I would be able to write more things on my own. I never like writing essays or writing a lab report, that’s because I never learned the basic ways that would make my writing effective that my audience would understand what I am trying to inform them about. With these skills that I have gathered during the course is a key for me to succeed in the future. Who knows I might be writing a big research paper to be promoted in my engineering career, because most of the time in engineering your giving information to your company and also most of the time technical documents would be involve especially when you are to present in meeting on information about budgets and project due dates.
I would like to give a special thanks to Professor Stemberg for showing us how to make writing a key for us to succeed in our future careers she taught us the best technical writing skills and to present Infront of our audience.
