Dale’s Unit Three Reflection Blog
Due to the nature of summer vacation when you’ve got kids, Unit 3 was the busiest one yet. I was unfortunately unable to complete the first letter to Evan, but I enjoyed coming up with both the complaint and bad-news letter in 3.1. I have written both types of letters before in my professional and personal life, but found the lessons in 3.1 to be quite useful in organizing and formatting the letters. It was particularly fun to come up with a scenario where I was on both sides of the complaint, which offered insights into how a situation can be seen from multiple perspectives—an important insight to have!
For the Formal Essay Draft in unit 3.2, I found the outline and work I did previously to be incredibly helpful for both writing and organizing my draft. Generally in the past I just jumped straight into my essay writing and organized things as I went along. Having the essay topics, method and scope laid out beforehand made the whole process much easier, and is something I will do more of in the future. I didn’t find any surprises in the results from either my survey or interviews, but rather found it interesting to see my hunches backed up by the data. I still have to complete the abstract and letter of transmittal, but imagine the rest of the revision process to be relatively straight forward.
I found the Peer Review section of 3.3 to be the most challenging task in the unit. While my partner’s essay was interesting and relatable to my own life (I live close to the Costco they wrote about), the essay had some issues with organization and clarity, which made it hard to organize my own thoughts in such a way that would be useful for their revisions. I approached the review by organizing it into sections on grammar, organization, etc, and tried to find examples for each one of my recommendations. Hopefully my partner finds these comments useful. As for their recommendations on my essay, I was pleased to see that they enjoyed the report and will apply their recommendations. They did mention that some of the sections needed to be lengthened to meet the requirements of the essay, but didn’t specify which requirements (I assume word count, but with the upcoming abstract and letter of transmittal I should be in the zone outlined in the assignment) or what information needed to be expanded upon. I will take this feedback, however, and see where I can expand to the benefit of my arguments.
Enclosure: Dale-Miller-ENGL301-Formal-Report-Draft