Among the course learning outcomes for ENGL 21007 is to “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond”. To me, this learning outcome encompasses the new things I’ve learned in Writing for Engineering, as it’s exposed me to genres of writing that are new to me. The assignments I’ve completed over the course of this semester have successfully engaged me in composing various forms of media in order to write about something outside the disciplinary sphere—for purposes larger than simply completing the assignment. They’ve opened my eyes to the actual writing that engineers use in the workplace, which is useful for me since I will most likely have to replicate this writing in one form or another. Whether it be software documentation or proposals, the writing I’ll do in my future workplace will be similar to the writing I’ve done in this class. In particular, I’ve developed the skills of adapting my writing to a specific genre and being able to write collaboratively.
Between the three assignments, there were some that were familiar and some that were pretty much foreign to me. For example, our first assignment, the lab report, was pretty familiar since I have been writing lab reports in my science classes for many years. However, the ones I had written before were either just pre-written worksheets where I filled in the blanks, or roughly drafted summaries of the experiments with very loose criteria. The lab report I wrote for this class was different in the sense that I had written the entire thing from scratch while adhering to strict genre guidelines, and I wrote it on an experiment that wasn’t my own. This allowed me to really focus on the specific genre elements of a lab report and fulfill its purpose, which is to communicate the results of scientific research for the advancement of the field as a whole. I chose to write about Rutherford’s famous gold foil experiment, and I made sure to show why this was significant enough to write a report on. For instance, when I wrote “This discovery changed the existing view of atomic structure”, I fulfilled the purpose of the lab report by showing why this research is significant for the advancement of our understanding of the atom, and for science as a whole.This contrasts the lab report writing I had done previously, which was just for the purpose of submitting the assignment.
On the other hand, writing the technical description was a novel experience for me. I never analyzed an everyday appliance as thoroughly as I did for the technical description, so it gave me the opportunity to do so. I chose to analyze my electric toothbrush since it’s a convenient work of engineering that I use every day, and it’s simple enough to do a deep dive on. Although this took me a little more time to get used to, I think it’s the best practice for the writing I’ll do in my professional life. Since I plan on becoming a software engineer, I will likely have to spend a good amount of timing documenting the software I develop. Writing this documentation for my software will be akin to writing a technical description for it, as a sort of user manual for anyone who plans to use the software. Taking a look at the writing I’ve done in previous English classes, I am able to see just how different my technical description is in comparison. Take a look at these lines as an example:
“The Oral-B iO Series 3 consists of a 6-inch oval-shaped textured rubber handle and a slim removable plastic brush head, atop which is a small, circular brush with durable multicolored bristles. The brush stands at about 9.25 inches tall from base to bristles with a 1-inch handle, slightly thicker than a conventional toothbrush, to house the rechargeable motor and battery.”
You can see that rather than writing a traditional essay or narrative in which I am trying to either convey an idea or persuade, this writing is solely focused on documenting and informing readers about the technical aspects of the toothbrush, which is an element of this genre of writing.
The other skill I’ve honed in this class is collaborative writing. When my group and I worked together to write our engineering proposal, we used the sequential collaborative writing strategy. This, along with the Gantt chart, ensured that each of us was able to contribute towards writing a concise and polished final draft in an asynchronous setting like ours. Of course, there were some issues. One drawback of the sequential writing style is that the sense of the group can be lost, or writing from one contributor might repeat or contradict the writing of another. In our case, it happened that a few of us wrote over each other in a few sections, leading to redundancy and repetition in some sections. We were able to collaboratively edit our sections and eliminate this redundancy to make a seamless product that still retained the sense of the group. When it came time for presentations, we used a similar strategy. We were each responsible for 2 slides pertaining to the sections we wrote and presenting that information during our recorded presentation. Seeing our finished product come out nicely showed me that collaborative writing can be really productive. In the future, I will definitely work on collaborative writing again, this time focusing on writing code rather than writing a proposal. Despite the difference in genre, the strategies and skills I learned from working as a team during the engineering proposal will be applicable in my professional career.
In summary, the writing I’ve done in this class has been very different, but also very practical and applicable to my career. I am happy with the progress that I made this semester, and I believe that I have accomplished the course learning outcomes outlined for this course; specifically, the one I mentioned at the beginning. By embracing these new strategies and learning to adapt my writing to vastly different genres and writing settings, I feel that now I’m not only a more flexible writer, but I am also ready to handle any writing tasks that come my way in my professional career.
