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Throughout the term, I have written reflections on the process of completing assignments and peer reviews for ENGL 301. Each reflection details my learning process for each assignment and my discoveries of strengths and weaknesses in my writing. I hope insight into my writing skills will aid you in becoming a better writer.

My writing skills have shown immense growth from this course. From assignments to peer reviews, all components in this course had something to teach me. Before this course, I already had some knowledge of writing professionally as I work in an office. However, I did not know that there would be so much more to learn.

From the first assignment to the formal report, I have learned to better write in consideration to a specific audience, to omit unnecessary information and to write concisely with the YOU attitude when necessary. Through peer reviews, I have noticed that some of my weaknesses include being careless, writing in the positive and writing with consideration to a specific audience. Although I may still be weak in these areas, my formal report demonstrates my improvement.

My learning philosophy is to do assignments early, so I can self-edit to perfection. It has aided me in doing well on assignments and making fewer errors. Through peer reviews, I have noticed that although I make multiple edits before submitting my assignments, I would still have some careless mistakes. This has led me to focus on areas that I tend to make mistakes on such as not writing with enough detail when self-editing.

Peer reviews have been incredibly helpful in aiding my growth in writing. From peer reviews, I am shown my strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, they aided me in developing a critical eye for weaknesses in clarity. I noticed that sometimes when writing peer reviews, I can be a bit harsh. Throughout the course, I managed to control my tone and be more encouraging.

The writing skills I have gained in this course are invaluable to me as being able to write professionally is an essential skill as a software developer. Software developers need to communicate with many departments and sometimes even clients. Being able to write in the positive, applying the YOU attitude and writing with consideration to a specific audience, I can better communicate with coworkers and clients as a professional. I am happy to have taken this course, as the writing skills that I have developed here will benefit me for the rest of my academic and professional endeavors.

Creating my web folio was a fun and engaging process. It allowed me to review my previous assignments and witness my growth in writing.

My first step in creating my web folio was to add additional pages for my application package, LinkedIn profile, resume and best works. Adding my LinkedIn profile page was quick and easy as it was already revised based on my peer review. My application package took longer than expected because I found that there was a lot of room for improvement, such as adjusting the colors and sections to my resume and adjusting my closing section for my reference letter requests. I learned a lot from review my application package on how to write professionally when requesting reference letters. After polishing up my application package, I moved on to my resume. That was also quick and easy as I already perfected it in my application package.

My best works were saved for last as I knew it would be time-consuming since I would need to review all my previous assignments and edit them based on my peer reviews. Reviewing my best works, I saw that in my definition assignment, I had trouble writing to a specific audience. In previous courses, I was used to writing to professors who already had knowledge about my topic. Hence, it was difficult for me to write in detail with terms I already knew. As the course progressed, my next assignment saw much improvement in that area. The formal report was the opposite of the definition assignment where I needed to omit information since my target audience already has prior knowledge of my topic. I saw that my formal report draft had improvement with writing concisely and omitting unnecessary information.

After polishing up my best works, I moved on to creating an introduction for my reflections and one for my home page. Completing my web folio has given me a sense of accomplishment as it displays all the hard work I’ve done for this course. Moreover, it allowed me to reflect on what I have learned and witness my growth in writing professionally.

This unit was quite a learning experience as I had to prepare a draft for the formal report. When I sent out the surveys, I didn’t expect to have all my co-workers filling them out. As I was compiling data, I noticed that the new employees seemed to prefer to work in the rental department more than the strata department. This was something new to my knowledge as I thought all the new employees at my company were having a hard time learning procedures doing work assignments. I didn’t realize that the new employees from differing departments would have a different learning experience. Moreover, compiling data led me to realize that because our company is more strata focused, I only realized there was an issue with the new employees in the strata department.

Although both departments had training manuals, only the new employees from the rental department indicated that the training manual was helpful when working on assignments. After getting this data from the survey, I realized my interview questions may have been lacking and decided to meet with the senior staff I interviewed to get further information regarding this matter.

Gathering and compiling data led me to gain an in-depth understanding of my company, whereas the peer review allowed me to learn of my weaknesses. Jojo’s peer review made me realize that I am careless. For two interview questions, I decided to omit two graphs because I felt like I didn’t need to. However, from Jojo’s feedback, it was confusing that I left it out because for all other questions I had a graph to refer to. Hence, I decided to add it back in. Moreover, she pointed out that I only wrote the total of people who did my surveys, but I forgot to give the total of people from each department. Jojo’s review proved helpful when revising my formal report draft as I was writing the report in my perspective and not the reader’s. Not only did her peer review benefit me, but reviewing Jojo’s work allowed me to see how much detail there should be in the report. Her report provided a lot of background about types of dumplings which made it easy to read.  Looking at her work compared to my own, I realized I may need to add more detail to my report to make it more comprehensive.

Formal Report Draft: 301-Amy-Yung-Formal-Report-Draft

Unit two dives deeper into the world of professional writing. I’ve always had a LinkedIn profile, but it was bland and simple. This unit taught me more about LinkedIn and its uses. Recently, I was applying for co-op positions and many companies asked for my LinkedIn profile. At the time, I didn’t know how to improve it and I felt ashamed to share my profile as I knew it was very bland.  Right now, if a company asked for my LinkedIn profile, I would feel proud to share it as it looks very professional and attractive.

Lisa did a peer review on my LinkedIn profile and thanks to her, I realized some of my job experiences should have been put as a volunteer experience. Moreover, she noticed that I should add more details to some of my work and volunteer experience. By having her peer review my LinkedIn profile, it gives me a better perspective on how others view it. This peer review has been valuable to me as many co-op employers view my LinkedIn profile. From this peer review, my LinkedIn profile is even more impressive.

Not only did the LinkedIn profile help me develop as a professional writer, but the formal report draft also helped as well. The process of brainstorming an idea for the report was fun as right away I knew that I would pick the company I currently work at. For months, I’ve been speaking to coworkers how the current training given to the new employees is inadequate and causing a burden for me as I have to review their work. The formal report allows me to devise a solution and actually implement it with the approval of the directing manager. I am excited to see the results of the interviews and surveys and get a better understanding of how my coworkers feel about the problem. Moreover, I am excited to be able to devise a solution that can better my company.

For the formal report proposal peer review, I paired up with Cheryl.  This peer review process was very helpful to me because as I critiqued Cheryl’s work, I also critiqued my own proposal about the same issues. Cheryl was very detailed when describing professional terms in her field, but was sometimes not thorough when detailing how the company she works at operates. This led me to critique my own work and see if it had the same issue. By reviewing Cheryl’s proposal, it allowed me to see the strengths and weakness of my own proposal. Moreover, it allowed me to gain insight into Cheryl’s thinking. The questions from her scope section were well thought out and allowed me to revise my own questions using her questions as a reference. Moreover, it allowed me to critique my own questions from a different perspective.

Both peer reviews have led me to realize that I need to focus on writing in detail. More details can allow readers to have a better understanding of the topic I am writing on and give more depth to my writing. An example would be one of the questions of my formal report proposal from the scope section. Initially, I had a question regarding what senior staff would feel if a mentor was assigned to each new employee. I thought this was a good question to investigate, but Cheryl suggested that I should consider the workload of the senior staff. If I had added more details to this question, I would realize that assigning a mentor to each new employee will impact workload. Moreover, adding more details to this question would allow readers to get a better understanding of the correlation between senior staff, new employees and the current problem.

The assignments in unit two have helped develop my professional writing skills. I have learned many more strengths and weaknesses in my writing and techniques to improve my writing. I look forward to proceeding with my research for my formal report and doing more peer reviews.

Link to peer review of my formal report proposal

Link to revised formal report proposal

For Assignment 1:3 in unit one, we had to pick a term and then write a parenthetical definition, sentence definition and an expanded definition for it. I picked the term “honeypot” and my peer review partner was Jojo.

When I first approached the assignment, I felt that it was quite challenging. It was difficult for me to discuss a term that I knew to a non-technical audience. I had to use simple words instead of technical terms. Not only did this feel challenging to me, but the use of multiple methods for the expanded definition was also difficult. It was tough choosing which methods to use as not all methods could be applied to my term since they may confuse readers on the definition of honeypot if used improperly.

In the end, I decided to use the methods: etymology, history, required conditions, and operating principles. I believed that these were the best methods since computer science terms are usually operated with specific requirements and constraints. Furthermore, the history and etymology methods are useful because it gives background as to how honeypot was conceived. My approach to this assignment was to keep it as simple as possible. This made the assignment much more challenging to me because often I would want to use technical terms. Although they were simple technical terms, they were still technical terms. I ran into the same problem when I was trying to choose a visual. Most examples that I found online had many technical terms. I did not realize that it would be this difficult when writing to a non-technical audience.

When I completed my assignment, I thought I did a good job keeping things simple. However, Jojo pointed out that I was still too technical by not explaining in-depth in my example and using the technical term “vulnerability”. I did not realize that non-technical readers would not understand the term “vulnerability”. When I was writing that part, the term naturally came to me because it is a term often used in computer science. I did not feel the need to use a synonym to replace it. Thankfully, Jojo caught the mistake for me. It is interesting how I pointed out how she was using technical terms in her assignment without explaining them, but I failed to notice that I was doing the same.

Besides being too technical in my definition, she also suggested that I re-arrange my sections in the expanded definition. Initially, I had the order: etymology, history, required conditions, and operating principles. It seemed logical to first introduce the background of honeypot before diving into what conditions are needed for it to operate. However, I did not realize that my history section focused solely on the milestones of the development of honeypots and not a true background explaining its origins. Hence when Jojo first read it, she had trouble understanding what a honeypot was. Following her suggestions, I re-arranged the sections so that the order is now: etymology, operating principles, required conditions, an example and then the history of honeypots.

I chose to add an additional section to provide an example to further explain what a honeypot is. Jojo suggested to further elaborate on my example of the honeynet, but I felt the need to have an example focused solely on a honeypot instead of a variation of a honeypot. This example essentially puts together the information obtained from previous sections and pulls it together to solidify understanding. The example section provides further insight into what the operating principles and required conditions are.

When peer reviewing Jojo’s assignment, I noticed that she was focused on providing examples in any way possible. This was helpful when trying to understand her term, “network protocol”. However, it led to her using multiple technical terms. Since I am a computer science student, I understood everything, but to a non-technical reader, it would be difficult to understand. Her organization stood out to me as each section flowed well into the other. It seems that Jojo conveyed her term better than I did by manipulating the organization of her assignment and using plenty of examples. My assignment lacked in those areas as I was more focused on using simple terms.

The peer review part of this assignment proved helpful in understanding my weaknesses when trying to convey to a non-technical audience. I failed at considering the organization of my assignment and was careless even when trying to avoid using technical terms. Although I revised my definitions multiple times, I did not catch the errors Jojo did. In future assignments, I will make sure to look at them with a wider lens to view it from a reader’s perspective. Not only did I discover my weaknesses, but this assignment also allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of how my peers write. Jojo’s style of writing differed from mine where we had a different focus when trying to convey to a non-technical audience. It seems by having a different focus, it can change a person’s writing. I learned a lot from this assignment and look forward to applying my obtained knowledge into future assignments.

My revised definition can be found here: Blog/Word Document and Jojo’s review of my definition can be found here: Peer Review