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.
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(my current picture is somewhat blurry), updating my work history regularly, (the information on my LinkedIn profile is out of date), and writing about my professional achievements.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/