When I first started the course, I was excited to learn more about specific technical writing techniques that will help me communicate in a professional setting. Although I have extensive research writing in a research setting, I think there was still a lot to learn from this course. In this course, we created a research proposal which did not require extensive references. The writing style made it more accessible to others and uses less jargon. Being able to define unfamiliar terms is a useful skill and can be useful outside of a work setting. One aspect of technical writing that I am not that confident in was writing emails and memos. As we continued to write more and more memos I am now comfortable with the formatting and feel confident that I can make these same memos in a working environment.
Throughout the term, the consistency of the assignment deadlines forced me to actively plan ahead and continue to write consistently. I think that this suits my learning style because if I don’t practice writing on a consistent basis, it will take me a while to write well. I think that this will help me become a better writer in the future as I hope to write consistently even after the course in order to maintain my ability. I also learned much more than I would have working within the writing team compared to writing on my own. It is an amazing opportunity to write with different people from different backgrounds. I felt that my writing team had a varied set of skills which helped me write better and have exposure to different learning styles. Overall, I felt that the assignments were engaging and challenging to give me a chance to learn more about different documents.
One weakness that I discovered from my own time in the course was taking enough time to revise and edit my work. Although I was able to have different edits, I think that I benefit from more frequent edits and I think that is a weakness that I learned after taking this course. Moving forward, I will ensure that there is enough time to have multiple rounds of revision for my next written document.
Overall, this course has helped me improve my written communication skills as I did not write as often as I did while I was working the last year. Moving forward, when I step into a career in Software Development these skills will have transfer when I write memos to update my team on the process I made on the project I am working on. I will be able to make instructions and proposal to future investors in future web applications that I hope to make in the future.