Chris's Writings

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!

The Web-Folio assignment was the second most challenging assignment because of its large amount of work and some technical difficulties. As this assignment encompasses the entire previous assignments, I found that there were a lot of works that I had to revisit and revise. Even though the number of documents I have to revise was a lot, the peer review and the feedback from Prof. Paterson helped me a lot to revise my works.

The technical difficulty was something I did not expect in the beginning. Since the UBC blog does not provide the features of WordPress in the same way as a regular WordPress blog, it took me some time to fix the troubles such as how to create sub-folder or put indentations to my writing.

Although this assignment was definitely challenging, it was a valuable experience to review all the works that I did and see the improvements. For example, I could notice that I improved my writing in a professional tone quite a lot throughout this summer. It gave me confidence for my future writing.

I have wanted to make a website to showcase my programming portfolio, thus creating this Web-Folio gave me a lot of lessons about the content and formatting of my future website.  Also, knowing how to organize and manage a blog was also a valuable asset that I attained from this activity. Especially, the troubleshooting I had while making the Web-Folio would definitely help me operate a website or a blog in the future.

My overall impression of Unit Three was very overwhelming because of the copious amount of work to be done in a short amount of time. However, since the deadline was already posted from the beginning of the course, I think I should have done a better preparation for the final report.

Data Collection/Analysis

The survey design, getting the survey, and summarizing the result of the survey were less time-consuming and difficult than I expected. I assume that this is because I chose the topic(weightlifting and gym) that I am very familiar with and enjoy. For this reason, I knew what to ask, and also knew what I would get as an answer.  I could simulate the entire data collection process in my head before I begin and thoroughly plan everything in advance. Also, the result of the survey was very similar to what I had expected, so making an argument based on it was also not that difficult.

Writing 

As a formal engineer, I even have not written this wordy formal report in my previous company. Thus, formulating a series of contents and weaving them together to create one cohesive document to persuade the reader was very challenging for me especially because English is not my first language. So, I need to concentrate hard to create effective sentences that connect to each other, the section, and to the report. This was never an easy process, but I think I improved my writing skills more in this single intensive assignment than in all assignments in this course combined.

Formatting of the Report

However, the most time-consuming and challenging part of the report was putting my content into a professional writing format. My memory of MS Word was very rusty I had to teach myself about many features in the program such as putting a table of contents, setting a format for each paragraph level and etc. After all, this was a good experience to learn these skills because they will be useful in my career in the future.

The final thoughts after this section is that I again, realized that there is never too preparation in the world. From now on, I will wisely manage my time and write the best version of my final formal report.

The first draft of my formal report: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl30198a2022s12/2022/07/22/draft-of-formal-report/

My overall impression of Unit Two is that I feel like I became more strategic and engaged in writing as I kept thinking about the technical parts of writing such as audience, purpose, and structure of my writing throughout the unit.  This improvement was mostly achieved through writing the project proposal and the progress report. Based on the feedback I received in this unit, I will keep improving my technical writing skills.

Project Proposal, Outline, and Progress Report

I think the best part I did in the project proposal was selecting an appropriate topic for the proposal. Since Birdcoop Fitness Centre is a place that I visit several times a week for months, I could easily spot a problem there. Also, the size and the scope of the problem were small enough to make a proposal by me in a couple of months. Still, I felt that I need more practice in writing in a formal/professional tone as it took me a while to come up with the final proposal to find the right expressions for the project proposal this time. What I can also do to achieve the best result for this research project is to observe the timeline that I set. Since it is a long research project, missing a few deadlines can accumulate into a big burden I can fix later. So I will focus on meeting the deadlines that I said by constantly working on the project.

LinkedIn

Even though I have been using LinkedIn for a few years, I did not use LinkedIn strategically until I started the LinkedIn assignment in this unit. This assignment gave me new insights into how to maximize the benefit of LinkedIn. For example, I did not care too much about a summary of my LinkedIn profile before this unit, but I realized that I can put my unique story there and grab other people’s attention with it. In terms of writing, I learned that I should not sign off when I write a professional memo. Also, I realized that I used too many imperative verbs in my writing compromising the persuasiveness of the writing. I will keep these rules and skills in my mind and apply them correctly in my next writing.

Peer Review

Dannis and I exchanged reviews of each other’s project proposals. Thanks to Dannis’s thorough review, I could fix a few grammar errors that I made even after several proofreadings. Also, a third person’s recognition of my project proposal gave me assertion about my writing so that I could be more confident with it.

While I review Dannis’s proposal I learned how to write a professional proposal because her writing was both concise and informative at the same time. Also, I applied the rule of not using pronouns when criticizing someone’s writing to separate the person and the writing this time. It turned out that the rule is very effective and I will keep practice this rule for similar situations in the future.

Revised Proposal: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl30198a2022s12/2022/06/22/formal-report-proposal-chris-jung/

Peer Review of Original Proposal: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl30198a2022s12/2022/06/29/denniss-peer-review-of-electronic-queuing-system-for-popular-gym-equipment-by-chris/

Writing My Definition

Writing my own definition gave me a good lesson that I need to focus more on the target audience than myself when I write. The first mistake I made was that I decided to write the definition I am so familiar with that I did not consider how difficult the term would be for the audience. I chose the term ‘time complexity’ because I use this term every day as I study Computer Science. However, as I explain the term from the very scratch, I realized that I may have chosen a word that is too complex for non-technical readers. For this reason, my writing became very long to elaborate on the correct meaning of the term. I felt the great importance of fitting my writing to the target audience through this assignment. Even though the writing became longer than I planned, it was a valuable experience to learn how to explain a new concept to the audience using different definitions. Also, keeping my writing in a professional format throughout the assignment was good practice for my career.

Peer Review

The definition I reviewed  Benson’s definition, which is about the term ‘abstraction’ used in Computer Science like mine. As soon as I read my teammate’s review, so  I realized that I should’ve chosen a simpler concept like this if I had wanted to explain a concept from Computer Science. This definition was a good example of an easy and informative definition. However, my duty was to find room for improvements in many different aspects of writing. I studied the correct ways of writing definitions and proper formatting. Therefore, I could spot a couple of mistakes and a few ways to improve Benson’s writing. A valuable achievement from this review was that I discovered that I made the same mistake I found in Benson’s writing such as an abrupt ending of the assignment. Thus, this was also a good opportunity to reflect on my own writing as well in the end.

Revisions

Having my writing reviewed by a third person was a definitely effective way to find the strength and the weakness in my writing. Denis thoroughly reviewed my writing and analyzed problems with my writing and potential solutions. The noticeable one was that Denis felt that my writing has a certain degree of difficulty for non-technical readers even though I put quite an effort to elaborate on the term using an easy example. I realized the importance of choosing a good topic for the target reader again. To make my writing easier for the target audience, I removed some numbers and unnecessary computations in my writing and made my example simpler by removing redundant sentences. Other than that, Denis gave some good suggestions to improve the readability of my writing such as better spacing between paragraphs, and a change in a position of a figure. I agreed to those suggestions and applied them to write my revised definition. I found that the readability of the writing improved after revision. Lastly, she pointed out that my citation list is not in alphabetical order which I did not even know was required. I fixed it as well and it was nice to learn something that I did not know about technical writing.

Overall, unit one was a very good learning opportunity for me to learn the fundamentals of technical writing such as audience targeting, different ways to explain a concept, and writing in a proper format. The three processes of Writing-Reviewing-Revision were a definitely effective way to diagnose my writing and find a way to improve it.

Revised Definition : https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl30198a2022s12/2022/06/08/definition-time-complexity/

Peer Review : https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl30198a2022s12/2022/06/10/peer-review-of-definition-time-complexity/

Offer Mail 1

Dear Dale,

I am writing this mail to invite you to my writing team for ENGL 301 course. I was impressed by your biography and application letter, especially how you combine technology and your communication skills to create new values. Your in-depth and long experience in writing will be also very beneficial for our team in doing big a writing project in this course.

I am also a BCS student with a previous degree in Mechanical Engineering. I had worked as a professional mechanical design engineer for 1.5 years before joining UBC, so we have a similarity in our interests and different backgrounds. For more information about me, please refer to the attached application letter. I think the similarity would help us understand each other better and the difference will add more diversity to our team.

For this reason, I think we can be great teammates in this course. If you are interested in forming a team with me, please reply to this mail. Thank you!

Best Regards,

Chris Jung

eunhocj@student.ubc.ca

Enclosure: 301 Chris Jung Application Letter

Offer Mail 2

Dear Piper,

I am writing this mail to invite you to my writing team for ENGL 301 course. I was impressed by your biography and application letter, especially by your various writing experiences with people and your diligence in work. Your academic experience in writing will be also very beneficial for our team in doing a writing project in this course.

I am a part of Bachelor of Computer Science degree with a previous degree in Mechanical Engineering. I had worked as a professional mechanical design engineer for 1.5 years before joining UBC, so we have quite different backgrounds. For more information about me, please refer to the attached application letter. I think the difference in our experiences will add more diversity and creativity to our team.

For this reason, I think we can be great teammates in this course. If you are interested in forming a team with me, please reply to this mail. Thank you!

Best Regards,

Chris Jung

eunhocj@student.ubc.ca

Enclosure: 301 Chris Jung Application Letter

Response Mail

Dear Benson,

Thank you for your email and I am pleased to read your bio and application letter.

I would like to form a team with you as well. Since we are both in the BCS program, I think we share our interests and goals to a certain degree. This will help us understand each other and communicate better in team activities. I also value that you have several experiences in different organizations such as CPSC 210 TA and Co-op. I know how the TAs work and saw how many deadlines are strictly met every week. Plus, your enthusiasm for improving English writing will also be good motivation for the writing project.

Overall, I think we have similarities in our experiences in organizations and both have goals to improve our writing skills. These will be great assets in team activities in the future. Please let me know your team status now. If you have any other team members, I can join the team. If you have any further questions feel free to ask me.

Sincerely,

Chris Jung

eunhocj@student.ubc.ca

Enclosure: 301 Chris Jung Application Letter

Memo

301 Chris Jung Application Letter

42^nd W. Avenue, Vancouver, BC, V6G 1J7
eunhocj@student.ubc.ca

30th May 2022

Dear ENGL301 Classmates,

My name is Chris Jung and I would like to introduce myself and what values I can bring to your writing team. My professional and academic experiences will be a great asset to your team in creating good writing and robust work ethics in the team.

I am a 3rd-year year student studying Computer Science at UBC. Before joining UBC, I worked as a professional mechanical design engineer in a company with about 2000 employees working together. While working there for 18 months, I wrote business emails almost every day to communicate with people in and outside the company. In doing so, I learned how to effectively deliver information and how to write properly for different audiences. This hands-on experience in business writing will help your team professionally create better writing.

More importantly, I learned how to work well in a team from working there. I had worked with many teams with sizes ranging from 4 to 100+ people for different projects. To bring the best results to a team, I had to learn how to speak concisely and clearly, make feasible plans for a project, and meet the deadlines of my tasks. My autonomous working practice and effective communication skills in a team will contribute to building good work ethics for everyone in the team.

I love to learn and improve myself. Since English is not my first language, my composition may not be perfect compared to native English speakers. Thus, I proofread my English writing multiple times before submission and do my best research to find the most appropriate expressions. In this way, I received an A from ENGL111(Non-fiction writing course) in the 2021W term and will work in the same way throughout this course.

I believe that my professional experience working in various teams and enthusiasm for self-improvement will be great assets to your team. If you are interested in joining a team with me, please send me an email to the address at the top of this page. Thank you for taking the time to read my application.

Sincerely,

Chris Jung

301 Chris Jung Application Letter

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!