At the beginning of the semester, I thought of this class as another boring required course that I would have to take. Writing for Engineers? I chose my major of Computer Science especially in hopes that I’d never have to write every again!
My high school was an Early College and because of that, I ended up taking so many literature courses to the point it drained me. I did not enjoy them and never really bothered to try, only outputting the bare minimum to keep an A in the class. Participate once blue moon and then go back to quietly whispering with my friend group while the professor rambled on about some book she had us read.
When I found out I had to take this course, I was very angry, because it seemed as though my 2 years, 4 semesters, and an associates degree worth of struggle had yet to pay off.
The course turned out to be a bit better than I thought. The first assignment of writing a report on any topic of our choice seemed odd to be for a “literature” course, but I did it anyways. I decided to cover something that I was very interested and knowledgeable about, programming on microcontrollers.
Throughout the process of writing, I found it very fun to just write and write from the top of my head. I would end up spending almost 10 to 15 minutes at a time just writing about my topic. Throughout the writing process, we were also told to peer review other’s works.
These peer reviews helped me get in touch with the first course learning outcome: acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.
While reviewing my peers paper, I could definitely see the difference in our linguistic differences. The way we wrote the paper itself was very different. Our word choice, the way we presented our ideas, and the layout of the paper were all different.
I can recall one of my peer reviews for my first Technical Report, I was reminded multiple times to explain what certain terms meant or include images of certain ideas.
With this paper, I was able to connect with course learning outcome 3, “negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.” At first, I found these suggestions to be baseless as my audience would be those who already have a bit of knowledge on the topic, but as I thought about it more, it stuck to me: why would I write about how a certain thing works to people who kind of already know how that certain thing works?
As I realized this, I went ahead and implemented these suggestions, reminding myself that I had silently changed my audience. I added more images and defined certain terms and abbreviations. I made sure that nothing was left vague that the audience wouldn’t understand. It kind of felt like I was writing to little kids in this manner, but I can sort of see the reason behind it.
These changes were only made because I was able to understand that my audience is people who have no idea about this topic and therefore, I was able to, “acknowledge [my] and others’ range of linguistic differences.”
While writing this first paper, I related to course learning outcome number 7: “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.”
While I knew a lot about programming, I knew absolutely nothing about the development process on microcontrollers, the topic of my paper. Throughout the writing process, I had to scour search engines to find answers to certain questions. I did not have access to a microcontroller or even the Arduino that I included an image of in my paper. It made it very difficult to understand the process.
After many video tutorials and pdfs of the Arduino’s specification, I was able to gain enough knowledge and understanding of the topic to confidently write on it. Some surprising sources turned out to be a club that created model rockets here at CCNY. I used their presentation on how they utilize a microcontroller on their rockets to safely launch and land their rockets.
While working on the Technical Report, I was able to continue to learn how to use databases and other sources. I was able to find 2 papers from the EBSCO Database pertaining to my topic. Furthermore, I was able to find many online articles that give their two cents on my topic (the ethics of AI) which I found very useful.
During this time, I was also able to connect with course learning outcome 8: “strengthen your source use practices.” I had lots of sources, all of different mediums, ranging from simple quotes to images. I was able to practice how to incorporate these different kinds of sources all throughout my paper. I have included some samples below:
Once again, this paper also had a Peer Review. I forgot to mention, but these peer reviews also helped connect with course learning outcome 4: “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.”
Writing isn’t just about doing something on your own and then submitting it to be graded. This limits what your paper talks about and makes it easier for you to write something that not many others can actually enjoy reading or even understand.
I used to hate peer review, mostly because my peers would not really give the best criticism and be very vague as to what I need to fix. However, I soon found it very useful despite the quality or quantity of the criticism I receive. The process itself is a way to get criticism and understand how other people see your writing and how they understand what you wrote.
Working with others to see how they write and then possibly using that format in your writing is very helpful. Furthermore, by reviewing their work, you know what to avoid in your own work. For example, while I write my own paper, I will rarely do a proofread, as I find it hard to notice my own mistakes. As a result, peer reviews makes it so much easier to fix the mistakes you make, but also take the mistakes you found in other people’s papers and recall to not make those mistakes going forward.
These kinds of realizations also relate to course learning outcome 2: “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” I am able to properly revise my work and edit after being reviewed.
While I enjoyed the peer reviews for giving me a tool to edit my own work, I am still not wholly reliant on it. After the final peer review, I’m left on my own to proofread any extra writing I may have added or any edits I’ve made. This made me enhance my own strategies for self-assessment. I would use the built in grammar checker in Microsoft Word for spelling and grammar. I would also recall older pieces of writing I created for ways on how to contextualize certain ideas.
The proposal draft was something new to me. I had no prior experience working with more than myself on something such as an RFP. Heck, I’ve never even heard of what an RFP is! However, this project was the one where I think I had the most fun.
In this assignment, I was able to connect with course learning outcome 4. I connected with number 4, “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes,” because this was a group effort. While writing this paper, we had to choose which RFP we wanted to respond to from a choice of 4, one that each of us found for the previous day’s homework assignment.
We each read the RFP’s that the other group member’s proposed and from there we chose one to work on. Before we got to work, we had to first decide if we were going to respond or if we were going to create our own new RFP. Since the group collectively had no idea how we’d even start to make our own RFP, we decided to respond to one, pretending to be a company who was interested in carrying out the plans of the proposal.
The draft in which we answered questions regarding our project helped to solidify what we would be working on, but also helped us connect with course learning outcome 4.
The image above shows our response to one of the questions in the draft. The interesting thing about this question is that it’s not something that only one person can answer. It’s not like I chose this RFP because of these reason, but rather we all collectively chose it.
Similarly, in the image above, every group member had challenges to face for this assignment, so one person by themselves couldn’t answer the question. We all collectively had trouble understanding the language of the RFP and therefore decided to decipher it together in a meeting. Furthermore, we had to know who was best suited for a cer3tain portion of the RFP. For example, one person could be great at doing research, so we would assign that person to do the portion of the RFP that required a lot of research.
I am grateful to my group as they were always arranging zoom meetings and were on top of things to get them done as early as possible. The group was also willing to finish the project 2 days before the due date in order to get proper feedback from our professor. Things like these made it hard to fall behind on work and is probably the reason why we were able to confidently hand it in.
The presentation portion of this paper wasn’t that difficult either, since we all talked on portions that we worked on. My topic was the licenses and services that our “company” offered, which I found quite easy to do. I recall one of the group members were worried over whether or not they’d present well enough or they’d forget everything. We all told them not to worry as they’d have the slides at their side and if things turned for the worst, another person would take over.
I think these kinds of foundations are very important to a group. Without such people in your group, you will not get far. I learned to always be on top of things, as delaying your section may delay another person’s work, even if you did not intend that. For example, I decided to wait until Sunday to do my portion, when the due date we set for ourselves was the very next day.
My procrastination made it so one of the group members had to research for certain licenses that our company would include, just so they could finish the cost portion, which required counting the costs for acquiring each license. I quickly got onto the project, finishing my part as well as helping out with anyone else’s part before we submitted.
Throughout this project, we met multiple times throughout the week, each time laying out the plan for the following few days before we would once again meet. We also kept a chat for stuff that didn’t really require a meeting but still were important for us to ask. This kind of communication is once again very important to group work. Because we had this kind of communication, no one was left in the dark about what they were supposed to do or had any lingering questions that went unanswered.
At the end of the paper, I took on the mantle of proofreader in order. This task once again helped me connect with course learning outcome 1, “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” The RFP response was written by 4 different people so it was to be expected that it would sound like 4 different people when read. However, I didn’t want it to sound disjointed. I was able to change certain phrasing and idioms used by my groupmates to make the 4 person contribution into something that sounded like it came from one collective mind.
Throughout the course of the semester, I think I struggled the most with audience, at least according to the professor. For my technical description, I got 3 points taken off because I wasn’t clear with my audience, though I find that hard to believe. The technical report, I think I did a lot better with my audience, as I was able to meet with the professor to discuss what I was going to write about and make sure I knew who the audience was. For this paper, I struggled the most with purpose and argument. While I already discussed with the professor who the audience would be, I still didn’t really know the purpose for the paper. Why was I writing to them? Is it to convince them?
I think in the end I landed on the idea that I would write this paper to just serve as a caution for using AI (my topic was the ethics of AI). I didn’t specifically say yes, you should use it or no, you shouldn’t, but rather I gave them evidence from both sides of the table. I gave examples of 4 usages of AI and talked about how they revolutionized something new, but how they also came with drawbacks.
The above two images show the kind of wording I used to talk about the controversies of GitHub Copilot. On the other hand, the image below shows the kind of wording I used to show the benefits of GitHub Copilot.
I feel like my purpose for this paper relates to its exigency. AI is a up and coming field and consumers may just become addicted. Furthermore, CEO’s and other leaders of companies or whole countries may abuse these kinds of tools for nefarious reasons. I guess you could say I had an argument, but it never felt like this topic was binary, good or bad. I just stated facts and let the reader take away what they wanted.
At the beginning of this course, I was dreading going to this class, but after 4 months, I’ve come to appreciate this class. While I may not agree with some of my grades, I really think I learned a lot from this class. From learning about RFP’s to researching through databases for articles to cite, I’ve been able to find out things I never knew before.
Writing within the class (or I suppose for the class) has taught me many skills, and I think I can definitely take this beyond just this class. I am getting involved in some research at the school and I may definitely need to contribute to one or even write my own (if I’m lucky). Who’s to say what the future holds?
This class had taught me that writing is more than just putting words on a page. I should be writing with a purpose to a dedicated audience. I also learned that writing plays a much more important role in my career than I thought. Perhaps when I’m writing a paper for some research I’ve done or even for my PHD thesis, I’ll look back to the things I’ve learned in this course.
