When enrolling into this course during the spring I was excited to attend as this was my first writing course in almost five years, and I liked how it focused on technical communication. I didn’t really have any expectations because I didn’t think about what “Writing for Engineering”meant, and don’t read the course descriptions. One of the first readings assigned was the first chapter of the “Technical Communication” textbook by Mike Markel, that chapter “Intro to Technical Communication” made me understand the importance of being able to communicate efficiently, especially in the engineering field as there is a lot of technical communication involved. With that chapter I understood what the scope of this course would be and what I will be learning and putting into practice.

The first writing assignment was a technical description on any topic. When the assignment got announced I thought that it was interesting as I’ve never really paid attention to the importance of technical descriptions and didn’t realize how much effort went into writing them. I’ve always struggled with picking a topic and knowing how to start my writing pieces, for this assignment it wasn’t any different. I struggled picking a topic to write about and ended up switching around 5 times from a “pen”, “standing desk”, “Bluetooth headphones”, “portable charger” until I finally picked “Apple wired headphones”. I decided to write about these because at the time they were the headphones I was mostly using. Still, I didn’t know how to start the technical description for them or how should I set it up. I knew we were going to be doing peer reviewing so I decided to just draft up a bulleted description of the headphones. During the peer review I got back some helpful feedback, which included adding background of headphones specifically the Apple headphones, and describing what is the difference between these Apple headphones vs the other ones. In this assignment I learned how important it is for someone else to read your work as their perspective and knowledge gives you insight on what you can do to improve your work. When writing this assignment, I was not thinking about audience, sources, quoting or synthesizing these sources. I mostly focused on getting the assignment completed by 

the deadline but also making it readable. 

The next assignment was to write a memo for an improvement in the City College campus. For this assignment I landed on having sleeping pods installed around the campus for students and staff who want to take a break/nap in a safe and private space can do so without having to leave the campus. During this assignment I spent close attention to both my audience and my tone. The goal for this memo was to influence our target audience to accept our proposal. I thought about who my target audience should be and why should they consider implementing this feature, I also thought about who this mostly affects. As a student who works full time, I made my schedule based on my work schedule. This semester I only took two classes; they were both on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Even though it was only two classes it still felt like a lot sometimes since I would go to class at 8:00am and then work from 10:30am – 4:30pm and then class again. If these sleeping pods were available on campus I would for sure use them. When going through peer reviews, I was told that they agree and would also use them if they were available. I was also told by my peers and professor to switch the tone as it seemed that I was undermining my suggestion to improving the campus and to add more details and maybe a manufacturer. I once again found feedback really useful as it made me negotiate my writing goals and add on to my audience expectations. 

For the next assignment, the lab report, I decided to write it on sorting algorithms. When creating the draft I had trouble seeing where I should add sources in the report, and what other context to add besides the experiment results. I once again found the feedback helpful as my peers suggested to add sources and quotes in the beginning when introducing the algorithms. All of these assignments have helped me understand audience, the importance of sourcing, and getting peer feedback. The final assignment was to work in a group project and come up with a proposal for an engineering innovation, this assignment was a great way to end the semester as it brought together all we learned about writing technical documents. 

By the final assignment I went from not quoting and barely using resources to finding as many resources as possible. I also thought thoroughly about who my audience and how much information I should give them or how much information they need. It also made me think about what my peers had previously given as feedback in the previous assignments and tried to apply them from the beginning of the drafting. Overall I really enjoyed this class as it helped me improve my technical communication. When writing technical documents at work I now think about audience, context, and goals.