Self-evaluation is one of the most crucial activities to becoming successful in almost everything including academia. It helps one to reflect, rectify and improve on our activities. This semester was loaded with a lot of interesting topics and their accompanying assignments. Topics included Lab Report Analysis, Technical Description, and Engineering Proposal among others.
I have learned a lot of things about writing and this was made possible during our peer review of both the Technical Description Report and the Lab Report. As I evaluate and review my peers’ work, I realized that writing is indeed a skill because some of the works I reviewed had a different approach and understanding altogether. Some reports were mixed with objective and subjective words, others were more passive, and others were properly cited whiles others did not cite their source of information. The evaluation helped me to reflect on my work and whether I also made such mistakes in my report or not since my report is also being reviewed by my peer. It drew my attention to some petty but important mistakes we do when writing a report hence I capitalized on that and became very careful in my subsequent reports.
In the course of this semester, I have noticed improvements in many different aspects including reading, drafting, revising, and self-assessment. Before I took this course, I use to spend a lot of time reading research papers just trying to understand the contents. But after the course, I have developed a strategy for reading research papers easily by first of all quickly reading the executive summary to understand the concept and then doing a second careful reading of the executive summary, reading the conclusion and recommendation before reading the entire research paper rather than rereading each sentence. My drafting and editing skills have improved. I now free-write my ideas and then later edit my written words to fit the standard format of a proper report writing format. Through peer review assignments, I have also developed a constructive criticism methodology which is a great achievement and has increased my productivity in my writing.
Initially, I had always assumed that everyone can understand every written report regardless of background. This narrative changed completely after taking this course. This course made me realize the importance of always having your audience in mind when writing any report. Using jargon, and abbreviations without mentioning the meaning of the abbreviations makes it very difficult to understand a simple report or essay. Considering the audience for the report, it makes writing very easy for the writer when writing and understandable for the reader when reading. I also learned the importance of collaborative and social aspects of writing through the understanding that, people or researchers always depend on research papers, reports, journals, and essays to improve upon knowledge and solve societal problems hence writing is a social entity with many branches or classes and must be done objectively but not subjective.
During this class, we did not do all assignments in silos. We had the opportunity to work in groups. We were split into groups of four people for the engineering proposal. The groups had to create an engineering proposal with two components a written proposal and a virtual presentation. This gives a chance to develop writing processes in a group setting. My group developed a group contract to guide the process of each member’s level of work or contribution to the proposal. We also had the chance to evaluate ourselves as a group toward the success of our project.
Writing is just one form of communication. And throughout this class, we had an excellent opportunity to use many of the different forms. We used multimodal methods to communicate to our readers using pictures. In order to clearly communicate well to our readers, my group used pictures to assist the reader in visualizing what we are describing. If we didn’t include pictures, it would have been more challenging for the reader to have a clear image of what we are describing. An example is the platform screen doors invention that my group proposed to solve the problems that we see at the New York subway train stations.
We are all aware of the importance of information research in many fields, including engineering. I’ve picked some crucial methods and skills for locating reliable sources for essays. Academic journals were never something I used in my writing before the lab report, but now I realize how much rich information they provide. And with that, it is important to understand how to differentiate appropriate sources from others. It was overwhelming when it was time to look for what to write about for the lab reports. Another time I realized that research was essential for a project was during the engineering proposal. It was a little challenging since we were to find our problems and come up with solutions to the problems. We extended our source or reference beyond just academic journals. And with that comes additional challenges. The first one would be learning how to differentiate legitimate sources from others. You should keep your eye out for whether the author is a trusted authority on the subject, whether sources are cited and unbiased, and where the source is published. Also, I learned how to do in-text citations using the American Psychological Association (APA) style and also how to arrange the text when referencing as a bibliography.
“Strengthen your source use procedures” was one crucial goal for this course. I believed I had more time to work on some projects than others. I was able to have a thorough understanding of the assignments and projects because they were used so frequently in many of the projects and involved a lot of quoting, summarizing, and citing sources. I enjoyed compiling, reviewing, presenting, and doing analyses for my work as well as my group. I believe that if I use them to support my claims, I will be more coherent if I have more time.
