I am a second-year student at CCNY majoring in Computer Science. The ENG 210: Writing for Engineers course is a general requirement for my major, and now I know why. The course was very instrumental and even essential for learning professional and Technical writing. This portfolio is a testament to my evolution and growth as a writer, reader and also a thinker. To properly organize the portfolio, I have arranged it into sections. In each section, I have included the primary artifact for that assignment. I also will discuss here about the Course Learning Outcomes and the instances where I have been successful and also the ones where I needed to learn more. As for my methodology of self-assessment I have taken into consideration the feedback from my peers and professor, the grade that I received for the final work and my own reflection of my writing skills inventory. Overall, my writing habits have changed a lot. I didn’t really give much significance to the rhetorical situation before because they can sound deceptively simple but are really imperative for any decent writing. I have incorporated the practice of strategies such as considering the audience, purpose of writing, and proper citation. These habits have helped me to learn how to not write for myself but rather for the audience, to connect with them, understand their needs and learn from their feedback.

 

The Resume and Cover Letter was the first assignment that we had. This assignment was a perfect preamble to technical writing. We learned to take a professional inventory of our achievements and skills and embellish them to produce and write a powerful branding declaration of ourselves. This was an essential exercise which helped in preparing us for entering into the professional world and to navigate to better opportunities successfully. In this assignment I learned to format my writing to reflect my purpose, that is, to produce a clear and concise list of reasons as to why I believe I should be hired, and to enhance it for my audience, who in this case would be the hiring manager. For help with the writing format I used templates from Microsoft Word which guided me in producing a minimalistic but effective result. One important thing that I had missed was to include my current school in my education list. Rest assured that will never happen again.

 

The Interview Report assignment was more educational than I had initially expected. For my report I had interviewed an aerospace engineer. The most difficult process of this assignment was finding an engineer for the interview. But after that, the interview provided valuable insight into the professional world. Not only did I get a grasp of what to expect in my future career but also valuable tips and tricks to navigate through the difficulties and to find a more purposeful and fulfilling career. Other than that, the opportunity to learn about so many other interviews through my peers enabled me to find certain patterns and universal truths about the professional world, like how, internships were very important and that experience through non-institutional means may prove to be as valuable as academic grading. The project also gave me an opportunity to express myself through presentation and to brush up on some public speaking skills while also letting me review, question and learn from my peers. For the purpose of this assignment I had to use skype and also record the interview. This was an invaluable experience which definitely gives me confidence to conduct further interviews if and when required. 

 

Writing the Lab Report assignment was a brief journey into the writing realm of scientists, and as future engineers a very useful one at that. The topic of probability and an opportunity to actually conduct an experiment and report on it was an interesting way to learn this skill. I learned to obtain data and create calculations and graphs based on them using Microsoft Word. While writing the report I understood that our audience would be other scientists or academics and our purpose was to report our observations and calculations in a comprehensible manner while maintaining the parameters of scientific study reporting. One important thing that I learned doing this assignment was to use online library databases to compare my report with other studies and also to cite those studies using the APA style. This assignment will prove very useful to me sooner than later.

 

The Proposal Project was my personal favorite of all assignments. Although it was challenging in the beginning to find a rhythm in group collaboration, eventually our team learned to think as one, write as one and most importantly work as one. Our chosen topic was on a subscription based textbook service for students.  For this project we also had to conduct a survey which we accomplished by going around the campus and asking random students to give us their opinion. This experience was also important as we learned that technical communication could sometimes entail interaction in the field. My responsibility was to find the cost and benefits of our proposal, something that I find very interesting. To enable efficient collaboration among our team we used google docs so that we could easily provide our inputs and also revise drafts and again rerevise them to finally produce a finished paper. There was also a lot of research and reading that had to be done in order to make the proposal strong. Here again we used the CCNY online database to research, and towards the end we used APA style to cite all our sources. The most important thing that we kept in mind was our audience who in this case were our peers and  our purpose – to propose something strong and beneficial for the audience.

 

The Technical Description assignment was one of the last assignments we did. This assignment was a great way to learn about how companies write their product descriptions and manuals. For my description I chose the topic “Wi-Fi.” This later on proved to be a great difficulty for me as it was a common topic and though  all the content was written originally by me, safe assign reported a lot of content as plagiarized. On investigation I found that even my introductory question of “What is Wi-Fi?” was reported, I realized that this problem was inevitable. On further redrafting of my content, the report only seemed to get worse and eventually I stopped and learned to choose my topics more carefully. Other than this setback, it was great. I learned to use pictures from the internet and cite their sources and make it as simple as possible for my audience with the main purpose to keep it simple, informational and engaging.

 

Apart from all these assignments some other coursework included the Quest for grammar which was actually the most interesting way of learning grammar for me. As punctuations are my main weakness in writing, the methods of the professor helped me understand a lot about them though I still realize that I have further work to do. In the beginning of the course we each also had to post an Introductory Paragraph about ourselves on Blackboard which was a great way to get to know about my peers. Being an introvert I am not one for much talking but his made me feel more involved and as a result more valued.

 

In conclusion, the Writing for Engineers course teaches exactly as its name implies, and I was lucky to have such a great professor who really made learning fun and interesting. This was one of the most interactive courses for me so far as it helped me get acquainted with a lot of my peers. It helped me improve my writing, speaking, interaction, grammar, and helped me get familiar with technologies of the professional world. As for my self-reflection of learning and achievement I think my pineapple trophy is the perfect testimony.