Over this semester I’ve improved drastically in my ability to write to engineering and technical audiences, my drafting process, and collaborate effectively. At the beginning of the semester my writing was informal, unorganized and not audience aware. Through practice across multiple genres, from lab reports to engineering proposals, I’ve become a writer who can write to both technical and general audiences. This is documented in my portfolio which includes 7 pieces that show my growth in writing, drafting, collaboration and research. Most importantly I’ve moved from seeing writing as a solo one draft process to seeing it as a social process that benefits from multiple perspectives. In this self-assessment, I’ll analyze how I’ve met Course Learning Outcomes using specific examples from my work and most importantly I will demonstrate how far I’ve grown and improved.

One of my biggest improvements this semester was in my drafting and revision process. Early in the course, my first drafts lacked professional tonality and clear structure. For example, my initial technical description had many flaws including improper formatting, Unconcise writing and use of subjective language. However, after receiving feedback from my instructor and peers, I revised it by removing subjective language and replacing it with more objective language which also helped make my writing easier to read and understand for other audiences. I also worked in making changes to the formatting and also wrote more considerations that my audiences could be aware of. This made my final draft much more readable for a technical audience, and also a general audience that doesn’t know much about how certain mechanisms might work.

In the photos below are my instructors comments on my first draft. which I later took into account.

I took her feedback and applied to my final draft where I..

I learned a lot from my lab report assignment, where I showed a great ability to easily explain something complex and technical in basic visuals that anyone can grasp. For example, in the lab report I included a step-by-step diagram of the ball’s trajectory with labels like ‘Ball is kicked to the right’ and ‘Ball curves left due to spin.’, I’ve received great feedback from many of my peers because they quickly and easily got an idea of how the Magnus effect works by just looking at a few pictures.

Another key area of growth was adapting my writing for different audiences. In my group’s engineering proposal, during my part, I initially wrote in a conversational tone, but after reviewing examples of professional technical writing, I revised it to be more precise and formal. For instance, I would constantly make the mistake of using 2nd person perspective and using language that did not match the professionalism that we set out to make of our project. This prompted me to go back and be more technical about how much budgeting each phase would require. I made sure to make my writing sound more professional but I also wanted to focus on not adding too much technical gibberish which the average person would have a hard time understanding. I tried to use analogies to bridge the gap between technical and general audiences. In the engineering proposal, I compared budget phases to ‘building blocks,’ where each phase relied on the previous one’s completion. This aligned with Outcome #3 by negotiating between expert and layperson expectations. This change helped me better meet the expectations of engineering professionals and also made my writing easier to understand for everyone.

I would like to include that collaboration and communication has been one of the most important things when it comes to becoming a better writer. During the engineering proposal I got to work with a great group of people, where we all did our fair share of work and also worked hard to make sure that our project was top notch. During the project we all looked at each other’s work and we gave constructive criticism to one another in order to achieve more satisfactory results.  An example is when one of my teammates suggested I add a pie chart in order to show how certain budget parts were allocated instead of having a long table of expenses, and this turned out to be a great change because it gave the reader a visual to look at and a quick idea of what the budget would look like. Group collaboration can make or break a project but here it turned out amazing and showed how other people’s input can help you catch a blind spot.

Being a good writer also calls to being a good researcher, where you can come up with credible sources that share great ideas. Before taking this class, I would simply go on Google and find whatever sources came up first, however now I am a lot more picky about what sources I use because I check for credibility. When me and my teammates had to draft sources for our project, we each went our own separate way, but I chose to rather focus on looking at international case studies of successful metro systems such as the Madrid and Seoul metro systems. I specifically sought out examples like Seoul’s real-time air quality monitoring system (ThermoFisher, 2023) and Madrid’s AI-driven ventilation platform (Sener, 2023) because they represented innovative, proven solutions to problems similar to ours. For example the Seoul Metro case study was particularly valuable as it provided concrete data showing a 30% improvement in air quality after implementing their monitoring system. We later took inspiration from these systems when it came to designing our own air ventilation system for NYC.

One of the most important things I learned during this class is communication, whether it’s with your group, your classmates or with your instructor. I forced myself to become a better communicator in this class because since it’s online, that means I have to reach out more and not shy away from asking questions. For example, during discussion boards, peer feedback meant a lot to me, I got to know what skills I lacked/could improve on and I also got a look at what others were doing which enabled me to take some inspiration. I also scheduled multiple zoom meetings with my instructor (who is a very smart and generous person) and we went over questions I had, one of them being about upcoming assignments and how to do well on them. I finally want to add on how me and group members were able to use Discord for weekly calls to coordinate our engineering proposal. In these meetings, we’d screen-share drafts, debate each other on what we should add, and assign tasks transparently.