Strengths and Weakness

Although I learned a lot as a student in English 301, there were several weaknesses in my own scheduling that made learning the course material much more difficult than I had originally thought. The summer heat made it impossible to stay in the room where I access the internet and my textbook via my computer. This reduced the time I spent reading and resulted in me skimming material that I should have read more closely. The heat also reduced the amount of time that I spent writing my assignments resulting in a drop in quality in my writing. Though going elsewhere to write my assignments, it was not an option due to time that would have been lost in transit. My scheduling was also affected the quality of my work because of random events (more specifically unexpected interviews and exams) occurred for three weeks straight taking a day each.

The course work was useful in retooling my writing. I learned that the style used in technical writing is different than the essay writing that I am used to or the writing that I do in my everyday life. The numerous and similar assignments drilled me on the nuances of technical writing.

How What I learned Will Apply

Three things that I learned will definitely aid me in finding a job with the Canadian government. Learning how to compose professional emails will be particularly useful because it is one of the major means of communication within the government. Certain documents that I learned to compose, such as formal reports and proposals, are used within various branches of government and knowing how to write them will aid me in seeking positions and promotions within the government. Some positions on the government job website state that they want applicants to possess technical writing skills. All in all, I think taking this course was worthwhile despite my own weakness affecting my ability to take full advantage of the course.

Email, Letter of Complaint, and Negative Adjustment Letter Assignment

I found that the first two assignments of unit 3 to be particularly notable. The Evan Crisp email was a tad jarring to read, but fixing it served to be good practice. I learned to be less formal in writing emails of a similar nature, but not to the same degree as the one in the exercise. The letter and complaint were very helpful in the way that they taught me how to write for a situation that has affected me.

The Formal Draft

The formal report draft is, by far the longest assignment that I have written during my time at UBC. Upon reflection, I could have done better with my formal draft in multiples ways. The survey for the assignment could have been further fleshed out so that I could gather more information for my report. I could have also gone into more detail while writing the draft. However, I think that I did the best that I could considering that I did not have much time to write the assignment due to a change in my work schedule. The report may also be thin on the ground on information because it is assumed that the reader will know what I am referring to. In addition to this, I decided to exclude information in an attempt not to give away Costco trade secrets away. I decided to take photos for my report instead of creating a diagram (like of the one for the relevant parts of the interior of the store) because they would display what I was trying to say in the report better.

Formal Draft Peer Review

Upon writing the peer review for Dale, I realized that the information that I collected during the survey would be better displayed in a bar graph. That and I should summarize more of the results I received from the survey. I also agree with much of the findings that were made by Dale during his peer review of my draft report. It is clear that I still have a lot to work on in my report.

301 Formal Report David Cheung

Overview

Through completing the writing assignments of Unit 2, I have been reminded of and have discovered various things about LinkedIn, the planning of a formal report, and my writing.

LinkedIn

The writing of the “Best Practices Memo” was fairly straight forward. Most of the research I did was done via the textbook and websites, such as the UBC Careers Online website. I had, to some extent, known and put into effect some best practices that were stated in the websites I researched. On LinkedIn, I had previously reached out to an acquaintance on a personal level when inquiring about a job opportunity at the company my acquaintance works at. In the future, it would be prudent to implement some of the practices I have written about such as having a professional looking profile picture (my current picture is somewhat blurry), updating my work history regularly, (the information on my LinkedIn profile is out of date), and writing about my professional achievements.

After receiving the evaluation for my memo on LinkedIn best practices, I have realized that I have been using the imperative in my writing without noticing it. I presume this is because the previous types of documents I have the most experience writing are essays on historical topics (where the imperative is inappropriate and not used), or emails (which are unaffected with the inclusion of the imperative when it is used). Because of this, I lack experience identifying the imperative and must be careful of using the imperative when writing bullet points due to my tendency to use the imperative to set up further bullet points. The most likely place that I am likely to use bullet points is when I list something in my report like recommendations so I ought to take care when writing that section of my report. I also neglected to include a bibliography.

Project Proposal, Outline, and Progress Report

Being a member of the Member Services staff at Costco Vancouver enabled me to easily brainstorm a topic and preliminary solutions to the problem at hand. However, outlining my report was the most difficult part of this unit with creating a timeline being a close second. I have discovered that one of the greatest weaknesses I possess as a writer is my inability to outline, with any degree of certainty, a document that I have yet to begin writing. I had trouble creating a timeline for the completion of my formal report because whenever I have created a loose timeline for an assignment, I have failed to meet the goals of said timeline due to editing, and have abandoned the timeline. For this reason, I have little experience creating timelines for assignments resulting in the lackluster one I have posted. Both these problems must be addressed if I am to make use of what I am learning in this course.

Peer Review

Seeing my peer review partner’s review of my proposal, I can see that my peer review of her proposal needed work. In the future, I need to read peer review documents more closely and think of ways to improve on what is stated rather than just concluding that the document meets most requirements.

Again, I need to closely read my own document for small grammatical errors like misuse of words and larger errors such as addressing my proposal to the wrong person and forgetting to include a statement of audience.

Revised proposal: Proposal

Nicole’s peer review of my proposal: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl30198a2022s12/2022/06/29/nicoles-proposal-peer-review-for-david/