Mahir Shahriar

ENGL 21007

Writing For Engineering

Professor Sara Jacobson

Self-Assessment Essay

Coming into this class, I didn’t have high expectations for myself. I had always struggled with writing classes ever since elementary school, and I had not ever improved in them. This was mainly due to my mindset. I’ve always operated in the manner that there was always one right answer and that other answers were wrong. In writing classes, there was no one right answer. These classes rode the fine line between right and wrong, forcing you to create an answer that could be considered neither right nor wrong which you would have to prove and defend. I asked some of my upperclassmen friends who also took Writing For Engineering, and they all told me that this class was very light, so I came into this class with high hopes that it wouldn’t be a struggle like my previous English classes. However, this class proved to be more difficult than I could have thought, but as a result, I grew a lot. This class demanded higher-quality writing than I had ever done. Throughout the semester, we were reminded of a few course learning objectives that we were tasked to meet as well as we could. 

One of the course learning objectives we aimed to meet was to be able to acknowledge my own and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop a rhetorical sensibility. I believe that I was able to meet this course learning objective. I believe this was most apparent during the Group Engineering Proposal Essay. In that essay, we worked together with our group to construct one piece of writing which was the culmination of our brainstorming, designing, and modeling. My group made an automatic sewing repair machine, a sewing machine that can fix holes in clothing and repair them without any user work. While this assignment had some setbacks with group members, ultimately my remaining group member and I had to work together to produce one piece of writing, where both our writing styles would clash. We needed to bring our writing styles together and write in harmony to create a cohesive and comprehensive proposal essay, which I believe we were able to do. \

The next course learning objective we were tasked with meeting was to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. I believe that I have not met this course objective. Drafting, revising, and editing were concepts that were quite foreign to me. While I have done them in the past and last semester in Freshman Composition, I did not excel in them. From an early age, I was always told that drafting and revising was a waste of time. This was the mindset that I always had. Any revising that I would do would happen while I was writing and right after I was done when I would read the entire piece of writing in its entirety to see if it flowed well together. I always thought of drafting as a way to roughly get your ideas onto the paper, but I would have those ideas in my head, so I never thought I needed to. However, this class often required that I write the first drafts of assignments, and I never did well on the first drafts. I often couldn’t write a first draft as when I started writing, I just wanted to write the entire assignment. The first drafts that I would often write would be the beginning portion of what would eventually become my final submission, and that did not play out well for my grade as that was not the purpose of the first draft. While I did not fully utilize first drafts, I have come to understand their importance as I saw that many of my peers were able to write much higher quality final drafts if they had made a first draft. Unfortunately, this course objective was not one I was able to meet. 

The next course objective was to be able to negotiate my own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. I believe that I was able to do this fairly well. My main goal with writing was always just to improve. I’ve always struggled in writing so I came into each assignment for it to be better than the last assignment. The quality of each piece would then be gauged by you, Professor Jacobson, and the grade would tell me how well I did, using that grade along with my own opinion on the writing, I could assess whether I believed I improved or not. The reason I also took into account my own opinion is because there were assignments where I believed I had lower quality writing but received an equal or higher grade than the last. One such example was the Engineering Proposal Essay compared to the Technical description. While I put so much more effort into my portion of the Engineering Proposal Essay, I believe it to be of inferior quality compared to that of my Technical Description, which received an equal grade for both. 

The next course learning objective was to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. This is a course learning objective that I believe I sufficiently met during the process of the Group Engineering Proposal Project. This essay and project was a group assignment, one where the writing portion would be split between group members, meaning we had to work together to mesh out the writing. We were able to do this efficiently by scheduling meet-ups and online calls through Discord to monitor each other progress in our respective components of the physical project and the writing portion when writing it together. 

The next course learning objective to work on was to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. I sufficiently was able to do this during both the Technical Description and Group Engineering Proposal Essay where in both, I made use of pictures and diagrams for the items that I was writing about in both assignments. Also, in the process of doing both those assignments, I had to engage in the analysis of different when I had to utilize so many different forms of media for research, such as lab reports, articles, videos, essays, and blogs. 

Another course objective we were tasked with was to formulate and articulate a stance through and in my writing. I don’t believe I did a good job at this or even did this at all. For most of my writing, I remained very neutral and tried to present only facts from an outsider’s perspective to get the best of both sides, such as in the Technical Description, where I wanted to give my own opinions and biases about keyboards, but settled only to use widely accepted facts from different websites and articles. One place I could have done this was during the Engineering Proposal Essay, where we had to pitch our idea of an automatic repair sewing machine, ultimately pushing our ideas and beliefs onto the potential sponsor for our product, although I don’t consider that a stance on something. 

The last course objectives were to practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects and to strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources). These were all things that we had to do over the entire semester for all the major assignments, but it became much more important during the Technical Description, as that’s where our first big research assignment came from. I believe I met this objective as over the Technical Description and the Engineering Proposal Essay, I did many hours of research and was able to properly use and cite them in those pieces of writing. 

While I met most of the course objectives, the answer to the overarching question “What is writing?” still eluded me. Quite frankly, I think this is a question I can never get a concrete answer to. Our definition of writing will always evolve every time we write. Heck, I think it’s evolving as I write this assignment, this sentence even. However, this class had me spend a significant amount of time writing compared to other classes, which allowed me to think of what I think writing is. Before, my interpretation of writing was that it was merely a written form of communication. However, at this point, with all the writing for this class done, my answer to the question “What is writing?”, is merely a more complex form of written communication. While I still believe that writing is at heart, communication that is simply recorded, the style, form, and context of that writing greatly affects how the information is conveyed. This was made very clear to me when working on anything that required research. Lab reports were best at delivering pure hard data, while websites and blogs were best at giving general knowledge and opinions. Perhaps the next time I write and ponder this question, my answer will be different. But, that’s just how things are, as we learn, our thoughts change. Perhaps, I may never reach the concrete, universally-true answer that I want for that question, but that is okay. 

References

CUNY Academic Commons. CUNY Academic Commons Site Wide Activity RSS. (n.d.). https://engine210.commons.gc.cuny.edu/assignments/