Unit 3 of English 301 course provides students with opportunities to practice writing with the you-attitude and to implement it on the Final Report Draft. Based on the proposal and outline written in the previous unit along with the gathered data, students are asked to take the formal report project to the next stage by submitting the first draft for peer-reviewing. In this blog post, I reflect upon my process of researching, organizing and writing my formal report draft and reviewing that of my peer.
The process of gathering data was intimidating at first but ended up full of surprises. Not until when I started contacting my points of contact did I realize how ambitious I was: to interview 4 people within 2 weeks. Thankfully, my interviewees were all excited to help me with this project. They made time to talk to me or to provide prompt email answers. However, for future projects, I hope to start the contacting process much earlier. Two weeks is a relatively short window to arrange meetings, especially for busy people or those who travel for work. I was also blown away by the number of survey answers I received. By asking for help from the administrative assistant of the department, I managed to spread my survey to a larger student body and ended up with 39 detailed responses!
The writing process was challenging at first but it became easier with time. The previously written proposal and outline saved me a lot of time as I had a relatively good idea of how this report would look like. However, during the writing process, I realized some parts of the outline did not fit in as well as I initially thought. For instance, the overview section about the Co-op program was redundant because my intended audience knew the program very well. Hence, I decided to leave out the harder parts and start writing the sections I felt most comfortable with. After writing the discussion section, I realized some aspects that required further research work, and I plan to focus on that in the Final version.
Correlating survey data results with interview answers and organizing them in the discussion section was very worthwhile. The gathered data backed up beautifully the problem I originally anticipated and gave me a strong sense of validation. However, as many correlations are similar to one another, I spent quite some time grouping them together to maintain a logical flow to the report. It felt rewarding every new day waking up and reading the draft with a fresh pair of eyes. This self-reviewing process helped me see more clearly the value of this report to the community, and I got more motivated to worked harder on my report.
The peer-reviewing process has become more natural to me now. I was very impressed with Jenny Bachynski’s draft – it represented a lot of hard work, and it was very close to the final version of the report. Like me, Jenny also chose to write about a program that can be enhanced, so the frameworks were quite similar. Despite the topic differences, I reflected upon my own work a lot during this peer-reviewing process. One thing I learned was the importance of presenting only new information. I vaguely sensed this while writing my draft report but it became apparent to me while reviewing: Busy readers would easily overlook the information they already know, and that can decrease the report’s attraction.
I look forward to perfecting my draft into the Final Report in the coming weeks.
Enclosure: 301 Thu Vo Formal Report Draft