Christian J. Lozano

Susan Delamare

Writing for Engineering

5/19/20

Self-Reflection

            Throughout my time this semester in Writing for Engineering I’ve been able to get a pretty good grasp of how science and engineering papers are structured to make it both easier to read, and easer to write myself. I think I did well with getting both big and small assignments done days, or even a week or two before they were due. This gave me more time to revise and polish my work so that the final product would be the best I could possibly do, and I also wouldn’t need to suffer from procrastination at the last minute. This is especially the case with the technical description which I think was my best work out of the entire semester. For that paper I wrote about a subject that I was interested in, and I was able to quickly learn the formatting necessary to write a technical paper and was able to implement it well. Though in this, and a number of my other papers grammar is probably where I tended to make the most mistakes, I tried to make up for it by using programs like Grammarly to help me pick up on problems that I couldn’t notice myself and also reread the entire paper multiple times to make sure it made sense when read out loud. In these cases it probably would’ve made sense to discuss with my instructor or go to the writing center but in all honesty, unless I feel that I’m incapable of getting my work done without help, I don’t want to spend extra time doing things like going to the writing center because my time is limited, and I have to make the most of it.

            I’m very clear on the fac that I still have plenty of room for improvement, but as time goes on improving my writing is something that will happen naturally. I need to improve my grammar and my word choice and avoid writing in roundabout ways and going on tangents and I’ll look out for that but for now I’m doing well. Because despite the problems with my writing, I think my work shows my attention to detail and desire to be as informative and detailed as possible without being too difficult to understand, even if it doesn’t always work out. In my technical description for example, I was able to strike a pretty decent balance between being technical, but also not being too difficult for the average person to understand when explaining how the different hard drive parts worked. It’s a sharp contrast to how I used to be where I would always bombard my audience with too much information without good reason behind it (which I still do, but to a lesser extent). Now I’m much more aware of my rhetorical situation. Who my audience is, what they’re looking for, what they expect from me, and what is the best way to address their questions within my papers, these are all things that I now think about when I’m writing that has helped me improve tremendously.

            Though I have to say, while I felt good about the technical description, my least favorite piece would probably have to be the group assignment. When working by myself, I could work at my own pace and most of the time, that pace is much faster than other people. So, when working on the group project I struggled with some group members because their pace was slower than mines and I noticed that very few people are ever willing to take the initiative. We did very well with meeting every week to discuss our future plans for the project and we did divide work amongst ourselves but partly because of my impatience and anxiety, I’d often do a lot of the smaller tasks on my own to get them out of the way to make sure we were on track even if other group members could’ve handled it. All of this may sound a bit arrogant but that’s not my intention. My group members did a great job on all the parts that they were assigned to, it’s just that I felt we could’ve been more efficient if we procrastinated less and were willing to put a bit more effort.

Looking back, there are probably two nitpicks I have with the class that I really feel that I must address here. One is the peer review style, and the other is the team evaluation. The peer review sheet is okay, but it doesn’t do a great job at giving people meaningful feedback that they’ll look back on to use for improvement. A lot of what’s on the peer review sheet just goes over what the writer has done, and what they have left to do which is something they should already know. Admittedly, I hardly ever looked at any of my peer reviews and I always did just fine, so I found them kind of pointless. A better way of doing peer reviews would be allowing students to download each other’s word documents (or print the papers) and write comments on paper, or use the commenting tool in Microsoft word to highlight problems to fix, and maybe add some recommendations at the end of your partner’s paper. There were many issues that I wanted to point out to people but couldn’t because I had to focus on the peer review sheet and so I couldn’t give the best feedback which bothered me and I felt that this issue needed to be addressed. Similarly, for the team evaluation, while the point system is okay, it doesn’t really tell you anything. I would’ve preferred the option to write out what my members did well, and what they could work on with more specifics so that my instructor could better grasp how the group operated throughout the project. I’m not sure if these things can be changed, but these were things that made me frustrated and I felt it was important to express this.

            I learned a lot in this class, not just about how to write but also about various subjects that I’ve always been interested in, and how to properly research topics using academic sources. I never thought I would read a technical paper that revolved around the cooling systems on graphics cards, but it was interesting to read and made me realize that there are many thing’s that I only have superficial knowledge of. So now being able to use the Cuny database to do more advanced research and also being more familiar with the formatting of engineering papers will really help my future endeavors. There’s a lot I need to improve on but I’m satisfied with my progress thus far.