When walking into my Writing for Engineers class and looking at the syllabus, there were many assignments that were expected of me. There was a Formal Letter of Introduction, Memo, Lab Report Analysis, Technical Description, Final Project, Presentation and all accompanying self-reflection essays that was supposed to be done over the semester. I am not a very good writer and seeing all these assignments made me overwhelmed. I thought this class was going to be a lot of work for me. I have taken College Now classes in high school before, but I didn’t expect the work difference that was given. However, I got used to the college workload after going to my other classes. The main thing I needed help with in my writing was the grammar aspect. After completing each assignment, my writing improved, and it showed me my strengths and weaknesses in a writing assignment.

The first assignment I received was the Formal Letter of Introduction. For this assignment, the goal was to write about yourself and your future achievements. I wrote this assignment as it was a high school paper. However, after I got my assignment with a grade on it, I received a low grade. I was surprised of how low of a grade I received. This bad grade taught me to ask more question about the assignment to have a better understanding of what was expected of us.

After every assignment except the Introduction assignment, there was a self-reflection that were expected of us to do. The self-reflection was an extra assignment that helped us reflect what Course Learning Outcomes was achieved from the assignment that was due. The self-reflection made us look back to what we achieved and how that will better our future writing. The self-reflection needs to include a rhetorical situation of the assignment. The rhetorical situation is how included genre, purpose, exigence or motivation, media/design, and the audience in our assignment

The Memo was the following assignment I received which was to explain an issue on campus and provided a solution to the president of City College. Formulating and articulating a stance through and in my writing was one of the Course Learning Outcomes I achieved after completing this assignment. Rather than going all over the place when I am writing this assignment, I stick to the main points I was trying to show the president about a serious issue on campus.

The Lab Report Analysis was one of the longest assignments for this class. This assignment required the students to find three lab reports and analysis the structure of each lab report. For this assignment, I had difficulty finding three official lab report that was easy to understand. The process of finding lab report took my three times to finally find valid report. It was very time consuming since I could not find a reliable platform to find the sources on. The Course Learning Outcome achieved from this process was practicing using various library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to my writing projects. As I stated in my Lab Report Analysis “The first three I used were student lab reports, which wasn’t the most effective reports. After that, I found NASA technical reports, however they were too complex and difficult to interpret. Finally, after all these struggles, a classmate suggested using the library resources. I finally found three lab reports that were in my interests in reading and elaborating. As a result of writing this assignment, it strengthened my sources and databases to provide evidence to my analysis. It helped me learned that school library resources are useful and helpful because they are also an alternative resource to find official lab reports or just any information in general.”

The Technical Description helped me greatly with finding evidence to back up my claims. Since the assignment was to describe an item with technical features, it was necessary to find evidence online. This assignment as the Lab Report Analysis helped me find various resources to strengthen my assignment. As stated on my self- reflection “I know website that end with .org, .gov or .net are all credible. The websites that end with .com may be credible or not credible, it depends on the context, the person who wrote it, and if they used sources as well.” After this assignment, I have learned which websites are reliable. The assignment was not as bad as I expected since it is basically like a research paper and all your information you find is online.

The final project for this class was a group project and presentation. We all had to come together to figure out an invention that could solve a micro problem. Everyone in the group had a specific part they had to do. A group project helped my communication skills with a group. Even though we had a difficulty trying to figure out an invention, all our ideas combined we came up with a solar panel emergency backpack.

My writing skills improved throughout this semester after receiving notes from all my assignments. From my assignment from the beginning of the semester and my recent assignment, I improved a lot. I improved in my sentence structure and my grammar. However, recently I make an outline for every assignment I receive because it keeps in writing about one topic at a time. Outlines are a great way to start an assignment. I started writing outlines after the Memo because that was when I had to write longer assignments. However, there is still a lot left to improve in my writing and hopefully after each year, it will get better.