This course was both challenging and enjoyable as there was not a single assignment that is very easy for me to do and I could see myself growing up after each assignment at the same time. To be honest, I was a little bit skeptical about the benefit of this course before taking the course as I am a programmer and not a writer. After about three months of intensive writing, I realized that I would have a hard time working as a programmer in Canada without the technical writing skills that I learned in this course. Writing in a professional manner, using ‘you-attitude’, and properly formatting my document will definitely help me communicate in any kind of job I will have in the future.
What I felt was the most difficult was writing in a professional tone and English composition. As my first language is not English, the process of writing in English is not as natural as in my mother tongue. Plus, adding a professional tone gave me an extra burden even before starting the first sentence in the first assignment as I did not have any prior experience in using English in a professional environment. However, as I go through several assignments and received feedback from my peers and Prof. Paterson, I could improve my writing and started to have more confidence in using formal English. Also, to overcome this weakness, I acquired the habit of searching for synonyms of words that I want to use to choose the most appropriate one for a professional tone. I will keep maintaining this habit in any format of writing as I found this helps me make better sentences.
Throughout many assignments, I found that I have strong content organizing skills and I realized this in the formal report assignment. Even though writing each sentence was difficult, I could easily formulate which content I should put in each paragraph, and how I should organize the paragraphs and sections to make a logical and coherent report overall. What I felt was the key to organizing materials of a large document was to understand the function of each paragraph and the correlation between paragraphs and sections. I perhaps understand this better because of my working experience in a not-small company where I had to daily make technical reports for supervisors and customers. Though I did not use English there, the skills to make an appealing report that I acquired was very beneficial for me to get through this difficult journey.
Thus, if I practice more on my English composition, I would be able to write a persuasive report in English using my previous experience and knowledge I learned in this course when I work in Canada. Actually, I will be starting my first co-op job as a software engineer in Canada. I am excited to use the small tips and skills in professional writing I learned in this course!