Dalitso Banda
ENGL21007
Professor Pamela Stemberg
Self Assessment Essay
If there is one thing that I have learned from this course, it is that writing and the ability to effectively communicate ideas is important in all professions regardless of the domain. I have also learned to view writing as a process with stages that all require time. Over the course of this class, I believe I have grown immensely as a writer in various aspects.
In general, The outcomes of this course are to see a student be able to communicate technical information in a proper fashion with respect to context and the audience. This ranges from fellow students, and professors for this course to fellow professionals or even the general public going forward. One of the first learning objectives was to acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. The formal letter of introduction was a good gauge of where my linguistic range was as a writer. Before the start of the fall 2021 semester, I spent the summer writing formal letters to government officials as part of the immigration process to study in the US. I believed I was well prepared for this assignment but upon review, my letter of introduction was lacking cohesion and structure. I was good at making sentences that sounded formal but the flow of my document was a little all over the place. This was an area that I have improved on after taking this course.
The second major assignment (technical product description) was an assignment that I believe provided the most growth for me in this course. I was able to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment as it was the first assignment that called on me to submit a draft as well as a self-reflection at the end of it. As stated in my reflection for this particular assignment, I struggled the most with the planning, time management, and research aspect of this assignment. I did not allocate enough research time for the topic I was going to initially pursue, a process description of how information is transmitted on the internet. It ended up being a topic that demanded a lot of time to research its subtopics in order to give a whole and truthful technical description and I, therefore, ended up changing to an LED bulb description instead. I also found that because this assignment emphasized wholly but concisely explaining a technical product, it was hard for me to come up with a description that did not feel like it was leaving out crucial information which meant multiple revisions and a lot of time editing. In the end, I had to make a judgment call and decide what was necessary and unnecessary information to include while keeping in mind my audience. This coincides with another objective of this class: to negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of the genre, medium, and rhetorical situations. Furthermore, this assignment also helped me improve my ability to determine how to use a source to fulfill a certain purpose. For example, I mostly used textbooks when describing the science behind how an LED light bulb worked but I used EPA press releases and reports when I needed to present LED light bulb consumer data or bulb cost comparison.
The third major assignment, the lab report rhetorical analysis, helped me improve my ability to break down a technical document, analyze its major components and see if each component fulfills its intended purpose. It also improved my ability to find specific information from a source and then extract that information. Before this assignment, I was always under the impression that research papers were to be read from start to finish, the same way one would read a book, in order to understand it or gain information from them. I learned that just from components such as the abstract, introduction, and results, I can get the essence of a research paper and decide how to use that document in my own writing with proper citation and reference. Furthermore, the assignment was also a good way to use library resources and databases in order to find documents using key terms and tools such as advanced search engines.
Throughout this course, I also had various opportunities to engage in the writing process as a collaborative experience, something which was a minor thing in my previous writing courses. From multiple discussion boards where I could peer-review others’ work and vice versa to the final group project, I got to see technical writing as a process that not only entails working with others but also keeping others (your audience) in mind when you create a document. The final project proposal was the most collaboratively intense as my group had people with different writing and presentation strengths which we combined to come up with our proposal. Sharing writing responsibilities was something that I appreciated too as our workload was minimized with tasks divided and matched to our mutual proficiency. However, there were instances where group members did not complete the tasks and this negatively impacted our progress/success as a group. I learned that this is something that is an undesired but normal aspect of collaborative work.
Before this course, writing seemed like a skill that should be emphasized for people going into literary fields such as journalism and communications. After the class, I would argue that the ability to effectively communicate ideas is one of, and if not the most important skill to have as a professional. The skills and knowledge I have acquired in this class will be essential in my professional life even after this class.
