The ENGL 301 course has come to the end of the second unit. Meanwhile, the content within the course schedule was becoming richer and richer, which was bringing me more challenging tasks and various opportunities to strengthen my technical writing and communicating skills.
Creating the LinkedIn profile brings me some fresh concepts on how to prepare myself for social networking. From the research on the best practices for professional networking to actually developed my own LinkedIn profile, each step has pushed me forward in a self-studying process of how to build up my social networking profile. The research was acting as a previously strategy with suggestions, which provided me a “big picture” of how the profile should look like and listed which means would develop the profile on connecting more social networks in detail. However, the actual setup of my LinkedIn profile was not as ideal as what the initial strategy was planning. It is sometimes a puzzle to make the profile both concise and detail, which means the information that showing on the profile must be effectively attracting viewers and recruiters without containing unnecessary messages. This can be applying to each section of the profile, such as a professional looking photo with a clear background, and a concise but convincing summary etc. Even after completing setup the profile by myself, there are still a lot of aspects that I realized can be improved after I read the peer review written by Zainab. This assignment was not only guiding me to setup a LinkedIn profile but also provided me a brief introduction on how to build up my social networking by preparing and managing my profile.
Assignments on formal report proposal have brought me opportunity to experience a complete process on how to prepare and start a formal report writing. The original step is brainstorming, which is mainly focus on topic selecting. The fit the topic to my interest and major in geo-environmental science, I finally chose the topic of researching on forest fire and planning to develop the analysis with ArcGIS. It is to be estimated that the research under this topic can be explored in the report and its outcome through the analysis should be effectively meaningful. The whole research process was believed to be feasible and able to be completed individually. When I was drafting the report proposal, I was not making clear that the primary data sources are the major elements of this research. Followed by Dr. Paterson’s advices, I have make a couple of adjustments on my strategy of the researching process and start to realize that the way to collect, demonstrate and analysis the primary data can be a essentially important skill on writing a formal report. I appreciate the effort taken by Cynthia who provided me a sort of detailed suggestions from her peer review on my research proposal. Specially for the advice that her provided aiming on my method section and gave me hints on how to arrange primary and secondary sources much more clearly.
As I mentioned in the unit one reflections blog, the peer review process is of great helpful to improve my technical writing skills. By reviewing my teammates’ writing, I can see how various that different peoples’ articles can be. These differences can be reflected in their backgrounds, opinions, styles and so on. Moreover, the peer review process is not only acting as an exchanging of ideas, but also as a self-reflection and value-added to cultivate my writing skills. I have learned some different thinking from completely different points of views that I may never thought to write an article. And discovering some errors, especially in grammarian problems and sentence conciseness, which are not easy to be found only by self-reviewing. The cross-action between providing and accepting the peer review brings me a upward spiral effect on boosting my writing skills.
Going through half of this course, I have been taken different adventures and challenges in this journey. They made me to take effort to go through but brought me more benefits on my technical writing skills in return. I am looking forward to see what I will learn further in this course.
301 Jiajie Xu Revised Formal Report Proposal