Through out the term, we studied varies writing techniques and practiced writing technical documents such as definitions, peer review assessments, memos, formal report proposals, LinkedIn profiles, progress reports, complain and bad news letters, reflection blogs, job application packages, and formal reports. I have learned a lot from all the writing practices and feedback from my peers. There are still a lot of areas I need to improve on. Below are some assessments of my strength and weakness in terms of my writing skills.

Strengths

I am good at writing on topics I have deep knowledge of, and I am not comfortable writing about something until I have thoroughly studied them and have some detailed understanding of the issue. This ensures the integrity of the documents I write, because I have invested the time to study an research the topic. I would also like think my writing style is relatively easy to understand and explicit. I do not assume something is trivial therefore others should have known it, I tend to cover different aspects of an issue regardless how simple they are, because my audiences could be from different backgrounds and might not have insights of some areas. I think I also tend to put myself in my audience shoes and communicate in a way to make them feel respected. Originally, I have always been straight forward and got directly to the point without considering the feelings of my audiences much. However, because of long term communication to the clients required by my job. I realized that phrasing my words in a respectable way is equally important as to get the point across, otherwise I might end up offending others, and damaging the relationship.

Weakness

I am constantly struggling in finding the most effective wording to communicate to my audiences effectively. There are numerous cases at work where I could explain a problem clearly to my colleagues, but have problems in putting them on paper and explain them to clients.  I have improved a lot comparing to when I first started my job, but it’s nowhere near what I like it to be. I still need to put in significant efforts to improve my overall writing skills.

Applying my skills and strengths to my future career

The most important skills I learned from ENGL301 are writing with “you attitude”, starting a major piece of writing with an outline,  and editing my own work by reading it out loud. Wring with “you attitude” re-iterated what I learned from my job and improved my skill to a new level. Every piece of technical documents I write now, I start with an outline, this makes it so much easier to maintain a continuous thought process even if I have to jump to another task and come back to it latter. I have always hesitant to prove read my work, but I have been proven wrong many times. People make the simplest mistakes all the time. Reading my own writing out loud is the simplest method to identify those mistakes. Although I still might miss some of the mistakes, this is a big step forward for me to perfect my writing skills.

The last task of unit 4 is to create a web folio to showcase my personal and professional background and experience. This involves creating a web page , organizing and combining some of the work done this semester for the ENGL301 class. For example, a LinkedIn profile for professional networking, a resume for job hunting, an application package for a specific job including the original job description, a cover letter,  a resume, and three request letters for reference, finally the best works completed for the ENGL301 course.

WordPress seems to be a tool with a lot of potential and is capable of being use to create elegant blog pages. However, there is  steep learning curve to it especially for beginners. With so much functionalities to customize the website, but limited resources online to explain them in detail (perhaps due to the relatively inactivity of the WordPress community in terms of knowledge sharing), it was difficult to figure out how to create some of the layouts I wanted to achieve. Although I am slightly more comfortable of using it right now, there is still much to learn.

The process of creating the web folio was relatively straight forward, but it provided me with the opportunity to rethink the improvements and mistakes I have made. Looking back at some of the works done for this course reminds me some of the skills I obtained, and I should continuously remember to apply them in my work. Things like peer review other people’s work, creating an outline for a major piece of article, converting the outline to a formal report, and communicating with a “you attitude” are essential skills at the work place. ENGL301 is a constant reminder to pay attention to the details of every email message to clients or colleagues, and every technical document I create, so that they are effectively communicated to the audiences.

This course enabled me to face my weakness in communication to others and provided the opportunity to improve my technical writing skills. I strongly believe I will carry the benefits of this course to my career and continue to grow to become a better writer.

Two of the main tasks I completed in unit three were the first draft of the formal report, and the peer review of my partner’s formal report. I have learned a great deal from these processes.

Formal Report

When I was brain storming for the scope of the formal report I thought I didn’t need to do much research or collect a lot of data because I came up enough discussion points to convince the management. Even when I completed my outline for the report, I still didn’t have a concrete plan in terms of data collection. Until Jasmine sent me an email, asking about my plans to collect data or interview questions, I realized that I should actually include some data to enforce my claim of the current situation of the company. It didn’t have to be really sophisticated data, simple historical revenue and number of active clients would be sufficient to demonstrate the profitability and the client base. Additional calculation of dividing the revenue by the number of employees would provide a rough estimate of the economics of scale of the company’s work force. With actual data, it would be a lot more convincing to the reader that I am making a proposal base on these facts. Another thing I learned that was a huge benefit for the writing process was to write an outline. Because during the writing process, I always forget the discussion points and sometime lose track of which part of the report I am writing. These causes the content jumping around and messes up the organization of the report. The outline keeps the content of the report contained and act as a great reminder especially it’s been written for a while. I can constantly refer back to it about what are the main points I intend to cover, what’s the order of the content. I finally realized the importance of an outline I started doing it at work, and it’s fantastic.

Peer Review Process

My partner wrote a report about something really interesting and sensitive, food safety in China. It has been a hot topic in recent years because there has been a lot of food scandals ranging from recycled cooking oil, selling rat meat as lamp meat, chemicals in dairy products and etc. It was interesting to read about her analysis and proposal to the government to resolve this issue. One thing she did extremely well was the organization of the report, especially the numbering system. She had an extensive use of sub numbers which enabled the content to have multiple layers. The depth of the report makes it look very professional. I am going to looking into the possibility of using a similar system on my report, I am not entirely sure how it will look because my content doesn’t have similar level of depths. I want to replace the bullet points with something else because they might have been a little bit too plain.

Process of Creating LinkedIn Profile

I have had a LinkedIn profile for a long time and I have always tried to keep it updated, such as adding in new accomplishments, new skills obtained, and updating education or professional training experiences. One thing I have never realized is I should have a summary. Hard cold facts about work experiences, education, and skills are important information, but you communicate your experience and passion at a personal level with potential recruiters in the summary section. I really enjoyed writing a summary about my background and passion at this moment.

Report Proposal and Outline

I started the process by looking at the list of topics chosen by previous students in the ENGL 301 course. There are some very interesting topics, but I found it difficult to write about something I don’t have deep understanding and knowledge of. It’s also difficult to be passionate about a topic that doesn’t affect me on a daily basis. I started to consider writing something about my work. I have been trying to propose my ideas of improving our software to my manager and my colleagues during our casual conversations. Although I had a somewhat concrete understanding of the different aspects of the issue, I felt this was a perfect opportunity for me the formalize it and put it into writing. I can focus on the high level analysis and discussions for this course, and expand with the technical details afterwards. This can turn into a formal report proposal I can present to senior management and try to make a change.

Peer Review Process

I found my partners choice of topic quite interesting primarily because I went to SFU as well and had firsthand experience of the winter traffic problem, and I was extremely interested in how he proposed to solve the problem. He provided some good suggestions but I found that he didn’t have enough angle covered on the issue. The main solutions were based on the assumption that the reason of transportation shut down was not having snow tires on the buses. I think it makes a better argument to first establish facts of if it is actually the case that the buses don’t have snow tires, does installing snow tires solve the problem, are there other reasons buses, cars cannot drive on the mountain, are there any other possible solutions. This reminds me not to over simplify a problem and I should try to look at the problem from different perspectives and thoroughly analyze it.

My partner provided some excellent suggestions to my proposal. I completely didn’t realize I didn’t have a single sentence in the introduction to summarize what issue I am trying to resolve. He also pointed out that I should have a small paragraph describing what my company does, which I think is a great idea. I did struggle whether I should do it when I first wrote the proposal and decided not to include it. But my readers will not only be people from the company, but also professor and TA from this course. Overall, my partner helped me to understand the importance of restating my problem statement to present a clear objective of my report, and to consider all possible audience.

Link to my peer review of proposal: assignment-21-peer-review-of-engl301-formal-report-proposal

Link to my edited formal report proposal: 301-Wei-Edwin-Chen-Formal-Report-Proposal-Edited

When I started to think about the definitions assignment, I wanted to choose a topic in my field of quantitative finance. I wanted to define something that’s not highly technical and people might have heard of in their daily lives so they would be interested to read about the definitions. I also wanted to be able to tell some real life story about the definitions. I thought about a movie I really enjoyed, the big short. It was about a bunch of hedge fund managers anticipated the crash of the US housing market, and they proposed the idea to major investment banks so that could bet against the market while everybody thought the housing market was rock solid. When the crash really came down, they made a huge amount of money, but the banks were not able to fulfill their debts and started the ripple of crashing the US financial market. I decided to discuss the financial instrument the hedge fund managers used to short sell the housing market, the credit default swap and help people to better understand what really happened in the 2008 financial crisis.

There are two mistakes I made in the writing process which my peer helped me to find out. First, I was too confident about a topic I am very familiar with and I just blazed through it without second thinking the wording I chose to use. I ended up thinking of a debtor but wrote the creditor instead. Second, I made a typo in my definition where I wrote load whereas I really intended to write loan. The two mistakes could have been avoided if I second guessed myself and carefully reviewed the definitions. What I think I did well was I used relatively easy wording and left out the technical details so that my reader could understand the concept relatively easily. Overall, it was a great learning process and I have definitely learned my lesson that prove reading my work is the most essential part of technical writing.

In the self editing process, I carefully re-read my work and corrected the error my partner pointed out as well as a few other errors. In the future, I will try to prove read my work more carefully and maybe ask other people for help to provide a second opinion.

Here is a link of the new draft of the definition: ENGL301_Assignment1_3_definition_Wei (Edwin) Chen_Draft2

Here is a a link for my peer’s review of the assignment: http://engl301.arts.ubc.ca/2017/01/31/assignment13-review-on-definition_siliangliu/

To:              Dr. Erika Paterson, ENGL 301 instructor
From:         Wei Chen W.C.
Date:          January 18, 2017
Subject:      Summary of Application Letter

I have uploaded my application letter to my blog to facilitate the formation of a writing team for ENGL 301. Please see the attached letter for further details of my application.

Brief summary of the application letter:

• my academic and professional experience.

• mu future career interest.

• my strength and experience in technical writing.

• my weakness in technical writing and what I look to improve from ENGL 301.

Please feel free to contact me if there is further information needed.

Enclosure: 301_Edwin Chen_Application letter

111 1^st Avenue,

Vancouver, BC V1V1P3

January 14^th, 2017

English 301 Technical Writing

University of British Columbia

2366 Main Mall,

Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4

Dear classmates,

I am writing to apply for a position in your writing team and greatly appreciate your consideration. I am a financial engineering professional currently looking for a career change to become a software developer.

I graduated from UBC 10 years ago, with a bachelor of commerce and started my career as a supply chain analyst. I worked in shanghai for three years for Intel managing their materials for CPU production. However, soon I realized I had only been gaining new knowledge for the first half year. After that, the work became repetitive, and I wasn’t learning any new knowledge or improving any hard skills. I knew I needed something more challenging daily, and provided the opportunity for me constantly expanding my knowledge. I decided to pursue a more technical career. Risk management seemed to be a natural transition given my previous business background. It wasn’t clear to me what specific type of job I would like to do until after I landed my current job 5 years ago, with Markit Analytics as a financial engineer. I worked around some amazing people. They were smart, supportive, and I learned a great deal from them. I was constantly challenged to solve different technical problems for the clients and it was a rewarding and valuable experience. Part of my job was to develop financial and mathematical models, where I found my true passion of writing programs to solve sophisticated computational problems. I decided to make a change again to get a degree in computer science so that I am more employable as a software engineer. I am fascinated about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and algorithms design. I believe software engineering is the field where I will be able to make a true difference to change the way people live.

In addition to my career interest, I have worked in a diversified team with people coming from different backgrounds such as math, physics, engineering, computer science and finance. I also have experience communicating internally with project teams, and externally with clients in a professional context. I wrote technical documentations such as release notes, product user guides, product specifications, technical papers. I would like to improve my technical writing skills which I wasn’t always comfortable with, such as communicating with clients, design content or page layout of a technical document, deciding the scope of a technical document. I believe I could be a positive presence in your team so that we could learn from each other and grow as a team.

I sincerely appreciate your consideration of my application and would love to hear back from you to form a writing team. I could be reached at edwin.wchen@gmail.com or through the ENGL301 Facebook page by the name of Edwin Chen.

Best regards,

Edwin Chen

Here is the link for the word version of this application letter: 301_Edwin Chen_Application letter