This Engl301 Technical Writing course has been extremely beneficial and I am very grateful for the opportunity to learn technical communication skills that are vital to my professional and academic career. In the following, I begin by reviewing all of my assignments from the four modules, reflecting on the purpose and meaning of each assignment in the context of the course content as a whole. I then summarise the strengths and weaknesses of my technical collaboration and the progress I have made during my studies. Finally, I reflected on what the course meant to me and how I would use the content I had learned in the future.

The assignments for this course can be roughly divided into two main components: the main line of content that is being done concurrently with the aim of completing the final project, and other professional writing skills. I began to realize the importance of scoping in professional writing by practicing the three methods of definition in Unit 1, and this gave me a general idea of the topic of the project in Unit 2. The initial goal of developing a proposal is to define the research question and scope. My past experience of writing reports has enabled me to quickly scope the content of a report, but my ability to extract key information when faced with the vast amount of content available on the web could be improved. In addition, learning about LinkedIn skills in this module was a real eye-opener for me. Social media is much more important to the workplace than I had thought. In the future, I will not only focus on my job, but also on using social media and other online resources to help others understand and communicate with each other. In Unit 3 I refined my proposal further by adding a timeline, research methods, and speculation on the results, and then completed the full report. The report process was largely within my control, but the sample size collected from the survey was much lower than I had expected. This was particularly frightening at first, but fortunately, the sample size from the online survey increased after the initial draft report was completed. In the future, I will strengthen my management of survey results and consider the possible outcomes from multiple perspectives to reduce the negative impact of uncertainty on the project. I found that I was able to clearly articulate my claim as a customer in the complaint and response letter writing exercise, but it was difficult to respond to that claim as a manager. This is a result of my lack of understanding of the scope of my role and I need to improve my understanding of my profession and the company.

The peer review that has been a constant part of the project-related assignments has been very supportive. On the one hand, I was able to read others’ work and see what strengths I could learn from, and on the other hand, I was able to give my own advice on the weaknesses of the group members. It was a virtuous circle of behavior.

Overall I am satisfied with my control of the content and the writing process, but diction has always been my weakness and will need a lot of practice in the future. Also, I need to manage the uncontrollable factors better to prevent them from disrupting my overall writing plan. In the future I plan to do research and work on environmental remote sensing after I finish my computing degree.I believe that the knowledge gained in the Engl301 Technical Writing course will be crucial to my future research and communication with other academics.

I am very grateful for the guidance and feedback on my work from Dr. Erika Paterson and members of my writing team throughout the semester. This information has helped me to understand the most professional technical writing techniques, and the feedback from readers from a variety of professional backgrounds has helped me to not write behind closed doors. I will keep this way of thinking in my future academic life and keep practicing it. Thank you all so much!