Dear incoming students,
During the 2021 spring semester, I was enrolled in the City College of New York’s Writing for Engineers class. We were told at the start of the semester that this course wasn’t going to be any run of the mill English class. I scoffed at the notion, thinking how hard could a English class be, I was in for a rude awakening. This course changed the way I view and approach writing like never before, in this class, I learned how to write technical papers in the engineering genre and was taught that there was more to an engineer than just planning projects. Due to the ongoing pandemic, many of the integral parts of learning has been hampered, however, during this course there were more collaborations with other classmates than in any other course I had taken so far in my short college experience.
To what extent have I achieved the course learning objectives?
I believe that I have achieved most of the course learning objectives laid out to us in the beginning of the semester. I’ve acknowledged others’ and my range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility by collaborating and splitting work along with my groupmates. I’ve enhanced strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment from the peer reviews of drafts and comments left in our discussion board on different assignments. I’ve negotiated your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation through the repetitive completion of genre analysis assignments. Through the assignments that we’ve completed I’ve developed my writing further than before this course had started. It allowed me to explore effective writing across the engineering discipline as well as allow me to develop a more professional manner. This course challenged me with new terms and writing techniques I had never seen before such as using the apa citation format to cite my sources.
In what ways have my perceptions on what writing is and does evolve this semester?
My perceptions of what writing is has changed significantly during this semester, before this class all I had dealt with were normal essay format writings and taking this course completed took me for a loop. When writing before I had never had to consider rhetorical elements like exigence and media. throughout this semester I was challenged with establishing an understanding on rhetorical situations on genre, audience, purpose, exigence. stance, and media. The different genres memo. technical description, lab report and engineering proposal that we explored during this course were also foreign to me and I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn about these different technical writings during the course.
How does the audience impact the content and purpose of the text?
The audience impacts how you write your content as well as what your purpose is. Depending on your audience, you can be more or less specific about your topic. Your vocabulary can also change based on the audience reading your work, knowing who your targeted audience is allows you to better structure the document and better expressing the purpose of your writing. Understanding the audience allows you to determine how complex or how simple your writing should be, as well as helping determine from what perspective is most appropriate to write in.
How did remote learning impact your class and group experience?
Remote learning hindered what it feels to be an actual college student and limited people to working with each other through the use of the internet. Online classes take away the feeling of interactions with others and with digital classes and studying from home there are many things that bound to be distractions that hinder our progress. With face to face interactions being impossible, group work was also slowed as we can’t just assign a time where the group can meet up and do an assignment.
What was working with faceless people like? How did it impact your experience?
Working with faceless people was very difficult because most of our interactions with each could only happen through typing to each other. Although this worked effectively enough for us to complete our assignments the feeling of interacting with real human beings just wasn’t present. Everything being digital and working with faceless people also limited the opportunity to get to know each other and become friends with others which I had hoped to do.
Conclusion
After this strenuous semester, I felt that this course can really help in building upon your basics as well as challenging you in ways that you hadn’t experienced before in other English courses. Although the work load is heavy at times, this course really helped me in adjusting to the pace of college and allowing me to improve upon my time management. For everyone taking this course in the future I wish you to have a even better experience than I did.
