“What is writing?” is a question everyone answers differently. When I search for this question, I am responded with “the activity or skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text.” However, writing is more than just placing words on a page. There are numerous meanings for writing. Writing things down has many intellectual, physical, and emotional advantages. Writing offers people a stronger voice, relieves their emotional distress, and improves mutual understanding. Considering writing is the primary method of communication, good writing is critical. It enables people to have a clear voice and communicate with others while expressing their ideas, creativity, personal emotions, and many other things. These benefits of writing help people get greater feelings of happiness hence writing is different for everyone.
The semester has ended, and it is time to reflect on my work. I have taken English classes every year in my school years, but this class has helped me prepare for my future the most. I worked on many significant assignments such as lab report analysis, technical description, and engineering proposal that prepared me for my future goals. Each project had its own goal and way of teaching us how to handle our professional writing life.
Peer Review is an essential component in having the perfect written paper. In class, when we did peer reviews for lab report analysis and technical description, I learned many things about my writing. While reading my peer’s papers I noticed the mistakes I made in my writing. One thing I noticed was that my APA format was not entirely correct and looking at my peer’s papers helped me understand the correct APA format. I also discovered that my citations were incorrect. I observed how my peers did their citations and asked for advice to better understand the process of citation. My peers also gave me suggestions on how to strengthen and professionalize my writing. I identified errors because of peer review that I would have missed if I read the same thing repeatedly.
Over the course of the semester, I concluded that I frequently reread my writing, which makes it difficult for me to see my errors. I learned to write what is on my mind and express all my thoughts before revising and editing while completing the assignments for this class. This made me aware of every error I had made throughout the entire paper and made me realize that revision is more than just proofreading, and that competent revision and editing can transform my draft into an excellent paper. I have seen a lot of positive changes in my writing.
In this class, I learned that different writing has different audiences. When I write, I need to have a certain audience in mind so that I can write in a way that will appeal to that audience. For instance, when I analyzed a lab report, my audience was more interested in the scientific data than my own knowledge and opinions, however, when I wrote an engineering proposal, I had to describe my idea and how it would function to the audience. It includes information that was essential to reach the audience as well as my own personal ideas. I learned how to approach different audiences to inform them of my goals.
The engineering proposal was a group project where we were put in groups of four to five people to come up with an innovation or enhance something that already exists. To start, in order to choose a topic that would be interesting to everyone, we all brainstormed our ideas and wrote them down. That was important because it let me realize that group work isn’t only about my thoughts but also about coming up with something as a group. This realization will help me improve my interaction with people in the future. We all divided the work among each other so that it will be faster to finish, and we can all review each other’s work and edit it if necessary. This is also important because in the future I will have to trust people to do their own parts and revise them. This helped me build more trust in my partners. Additionally, this group project taught me to improve my communication and understand my partner better.
Genre analysis is very important as it helps me learn about other writers’ ideas as well as mine. In this class, we did assignments that helped me engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing. Pictures are a type of writing that is crucial for the reader to comprehend and have a visual representation of the writer’s ideas. For instance, we had to include images in the technical description and analysis of the lab report so that the audience could better understand our writing and analysis. To give the audience an understanding of the technical description, we were also required to label everything in simple words and with clear explanations. In the engineering proposal, we were also required to have a drawing of our products and how they work for the audience. To help the audience understand our product, we also made a slide presentation. This made me realize how important visual representation is since, without it, many readers wouldn’t understand the writer’s purpose.
It’s crucial to develop and clearly state a stance when writing. When I was writing, I tried to maintain my goal in mind and use straightforward words to express it. For instance, in the engineering proposal, my objective was to introduce and persuade the audience because the product we came up with was important and helpful for people. My position was to explain what it is and how it benefits individuals.
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