Monthly Archives: April 2023

Strengths

I noticed that I’m very good at giving peer reviews. If a particular writing style doesn’t flow or make sense to me, I’m quick to identify why (i.e. what does this term mean?). I’m also quick to take note of any typos or mistakes the author makes.

I’m also very good at formatting in terms of making things readable in a bullet point format which is something I’ve used throughout all the assignments. I think this is also supported by the peer reviews about me where the reviews often complement the clear structure of my formatting.

Weaknesses

I notice I hand in work late a lot of the time. Most of it has to do because I don’t add the course schedule to my Google calendar, and part of it has to do with time management because of work, other classes, and taking care of my daughter.

I also notice that the tone of my writing is too negative which is especially bad because it makes my writing sound less convincing and makes giving feedback more personal. I really enjoyed the “Writing with YOU attitude” exercises because they allowed me to understand why my writing sounded so negative, and I feel like my report topic of “Strategies to make meetings at Momonono more effective” was a good pivot to apply this strategy.

Future goals 

As I’m graduating this term and entering the workforce as an entry-level software engineer at Microsoft. Software Engineers especially as they progress in their careers need to plan technical reports on how to build a system. It’s especially hard to write this report in a way that is easy to understand. However, the skills that I learned from the ‘Definitions’ (especially expansion strategies), ‘Writing with YOU attitude’, and general writing tips such as avoiding imperative verbs, and formatting will make writing a technical report a lot more effective.

In Unit 3, the content involved writing with “You Attitude”, writing the formal report draft, and a peer review of our partner’s formal report draft. I considered this the most challenging part of the course because it involves applying a lot of components that we learned throughout the course.

Writing with you attitude

This concept was revolutionary, as focusing on the reader’s needs instead of my own allowed my writing to be more persuasive, and communicate ideas more effectively. A concept that helped is avoiding imperative verbs, which allowed my writing to be more persuasive by making the tone be more suggesting rather than command. Another concept that helped is turning the negative to a positive, which allows the reader to not view the situation as a negative but as an opportunity to improve, which is more positive and allows the reader to be more likely to enact the report’s suggestions.

Formal Report Draft

During the report outline feedback, I was told to use the strategy of turning the negative into a positive. Especially with the nature of my report topic being how to make the meetings in Momonono better, this is even more important as it’s much more effective for the report’s tone to be positive rather than negative for the manager to enact the suggested changes.

Some challenges I faced during the draft were underestimating the time of getting the participants to fill out the survey and finding research articles to find strategies to fix the problems in meetings at Momonono.

However, despite the challenges, the report draft was a good experience to apply the content in this course and was a very rewarding process.

Peer Review

I reviewed Aman Johal’s formal report draft. This was a great opportunity as Aman’s draft was very easy to read and figuring out how and why, I was able to apply his style of writing to my report. Aman’s report included sublime techniques such as formatting, listing the flow of his report before the report starts, and supporting points that applied the “Writing with YOU attitude” very well (i.e. using studies that directly support the effect of e-Scooters on university campuses), tabular spacing between each subsection for easier reading, applying a more transparent approach in my report (i.e. the negatives of applying these meeting strategies).

In addition, I found the mistakes Aman made can also be applied to my own report. This included applying the studies to the Audience’s context, and adding background information on the study (i.e. number of participants, who the participants are).

Conclusion

Overall, Unit 3 was very challenging as the draft is very intimidating due to its work count and scale (i.e. getting participants, and creating a survey). However, throughout the process, I learned the concepts of “writing with YOU attitude”, the process of writing a formal report and peer reviewing a report.

ENGL 301 Draft