Malena Arevalo
Professor Moser
Writing for Engineering
May 23, 2021
Self-Assessment Essay
When enrolling in Writing for Engineering, I was excited to learn how writing as an engineer would be since it is the major I am interested in. Throughout the semester we worked on four assignments which were a technical description, a memo, a lab report, and a proposal. These assignments tested and helped proved our skills in many forms of technical writing. Each assignment given to us I approached different, researching more for certain assignments and procrastinated less and less. In this self-assessment, I will show how each assignment improved certain skills and the steps I went through to finish each assignment. I will elaborate how I expressed my ideas effectively and directly to the audience addressed in each assignment.
The first assignment I worked on was a technical description. When I was assigned this assignment, it was difficult to choose an item to write about, but I finally decided chose a swingline stapler. When picking this item I notice it wasn’t as complex as the items my classmates chose, realizing this I was stressed thinking about the difficulty it would be to explain in detail such a simple item. Researching a swingline stapler made me realize that this device seems like a simple item but it really is not, a swingline staler has many parts to it and a lot goes on inside of the device when you are stapling two pieces of paper. On my first draft Professor Moser left a few comments, most were about small one-word tweaks that had to made but there was one comment saying to elaborate more in my conclusion. I did realize that my conclusion was weak and made sure to change it and add more to it for the final technical description. Overall, this assignment made me realize how important it is to be detailed and specific when describing something, being vague can lead your audience to be confused. I made sure that the audience was anyone even someone who has never seen a stapler. I made sure that any reader could be able to fully understand how a stapler works.
The second assignment in this class was memo. I have never written a memo so everything about this assignment was extremely new to me including the structure required to write a memo. My memo was about advocating for working elevators at subway stations for the people in need of it. I chose this topic because I’ve realized this issue has not much attention to it and should be resolved by the MTA. I realized that the audience you are writing to is very important my audience was the president of the MTA (Sarah Feinberg), it was important to be clear about the purpose and the stance I had on the issue, it was also important to provide certain evidence for my audience relating to the issue I was addressing. When handing in my first draft I felt as if it had potential to be the final paper, but after receiving feedback from Professor Moser I realized that the recommendation part was not very clear on how to solve the elevator issue.
The third assignment was a lab report, my lab report was about determining the probability when rolling dice. In this assignment required a lot of research because I had to relate my experiment to other studies done with dice probability. I really enjoyed working on this assignment since I go to the casino and always have been intrigued by games that involve dice. This assignment was a great way to practice my research skills for other lab reports I will have in the future. When submitting my first draft Professor Moser gave me a lot of feedback telling me I must go more into depth when explain certain things specifically in the discussion part of my lab.
The last assignment given to us was the proposal, this was a group assignment. I enjoyed working as a group because you get work done faster. My group and I assigned every member a certain part. This assignment was great for our research skills and to allowed us all to work group work skills. Our proposal was about creating the perfect roomba For NYC Subway Stations, I worked on the purpose and timeline of our proposal. It was important to consider our audience when we were writing which was the MTA president Sarah Feinberg. For the budget I had to do a lot of research to find out the money the MTA has for certain utilities. When we submitted our draft Professor Moser didn’t give much feedback on my parts except to just add a bit more detail.
I truly enjoyed Writing for Engineers, it felt great to see what it is like in the engineering world. These four assignments came together to help me improve on many writing skills. I learned to be clear on the purpose when writing and really take into consideration the audience I am trying to address to. I feel very confident to communicate ideas in a professional and technical manner being less opinionated and more fact driven when writing. My research skills were sharpened from the work done in this class.
