My name is James Walsh, this is my portfolio for Writing for Engineers. I am pursuing a bachelors degree in computer engineering and I hope that this course will give me the skills that i need to succeed in my career. This portfolio includes several papers written for this class including: resume and cover letter; lab report; group proposal; and technical description. These papers show my growth as a writer throughout this class, and the skills I learn will allow me to succeed in my academic career and the real world.
Reflective Essay
Finally Learning Something From Class: Writing for Engineering
Throughout my academic career I have taken many English classes, but this one was by far the most interesting and impactful. Writing for Engineering not only helped my grow as a writer through the lessons and assignments but also taught me useful skills that will be invaluable to me in the future. This class is the first one I’ve taken so far that makes me feel like I am here to learn instead of just for a grade. The class was centered around teaching us to properly write papers that we will have to write again in the future.
Our first major assignment was to find an internship that we would be interested in and create an application for it that contains a cover letter and our resumes. Since I am planning to apply to internships next summer, learning how to properly apply to one is extremely beneficial to me. I updated the resume that I already had, and then wrote a cover letter for the internship I chose. This also met the course outcome goal: “negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.” I rewrote my resume and wrote the cover letter specifically to cater towards my audience, the company I applied to. By adhering to their expectations, I made my application stronger.
Next, we learned how to properly write a lab report. This was extremely helpful to me since I am an engineering major, so I have to do many lab reports for class. We learned the proper format for a lab report and most importantly how to properly research using peer reviewed academic sources. This meets the course outcome goal: “Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.” Being able to research properly makes a lab report much more reliable because you can compare your results to others in your field which allows you to see possible errors in your experiment.
The Proposal Project was a response to a RFP (Request For Proposal). The request was for a potential overhaul of the current CCNY Student Center. Our group created a proposal for a new Student Center that included: the design, the cost, the timetables, the materials, and other logistics. It also included evidence from studies that show the benefit of an upgraded student center. Because we were working as a group we met the course outcome goal: “Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” The differences in our writing styles helped us improve our argument that a new student center would be very beneficial.
For my Technical Description, I chose to cover The Dark Web. I chose this because the internet is something that almost everyone uses daily, but there is a whole other side to it that most people don’t see so it’s important to be aware of the dangerous parts of the internet. To write a Technical Description you have to become very knowledge about the topic you are covering which requires a lot of research. Through this, we met course outcome goal: “Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).” We found and utilized many different sources by citing them in APA format, and summarizing and synthesizing evidence to strengthen our presentation.
Through the various lessons in the class we learned many things. One of those is how to properly use punctuation and grammar to strengthen our writing. This meets the course outcome goal: “Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing.” By correctly using punctuation and grammar we can make our writing easier for the reader to understand, which allows our purpose to shine. Through the various group activities that we did, we met the course outcome goal: “Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” Engaging in group work showed us how to utilize group members to elevate your work. By leaning into their strengths and focusing on what you are good at, work becomes easier and the final product is much higher quality.
In conclusion, Writing for Engineering has been an extremely beneficial class for me. I learned a lot of things that are not only very useful to me personally, but I am also interested in. The lessons I learned in this class will be used on a near daily basis for the rest of my academic and professional career. I improved my general writing skill, and learned how to properly write papers that I will have to write in the future. I also genuinely enjoyed this class, I looked forward to coming to class and was engaged throughout the lessons and was happy that I was learning things that I actually need to know. And most importantly, I learned how to staple a paper at a 45 degree angle.
