I believe my technical writing skill has improved after taking ENGL 301.  Even though it’s painful for me to write many different kinds of passages (emails, memos, letters…), the whole process is well worth the effort. Needless to say, professional writing skill is very important and it will be my valuable asset. Therefore I am grateful I have taken this course.

Throughout this course, I had a hard time adjusting to different types of assignments. I was not familiar with professional letters, emails, or reviewing other’s work. Therefore, I had spent quite some time thinking and searching for proper and professional wordings while doing the assignment. Now I am more familiar with it; thus practicing is very important. Another weakness is my grammar. My peers often pointed out some grammatical errors for me. Even though it’s somewhat discouraging as I have proofread my writings several times, I do believe practicing more would help me overcome this.

My psychology research background helped me a lot while designing and writing my formal report. Generally, I had a great time composing the survey and collecting the results. My fellow students have provided me with great insights and their ideas for improvements. However, I did make a mistake while sending out my survey, which resulted in a very unrepresentative sample size in my study. I have learned from that mistake and I believe I can do better next time.

Writing my LinkedIn profile as well as web folio is painful yet rewarding. LinkedIn is the most used social network in business contexts.  Completing my profile can help me set up a foundation as it will be easier for me to update and polish it further when I graduate and look for a career. Web folio can help me showcase my technical writing skills by presenting the great works I have written in this class.

In conclusion, I have learned a lot in this course through every assignment. I recommend this class to all students.

Creating a web folio is a meaningful process. I get to organize most of my works I have written for this course and put them together to showcase my technical writing skills.

I use a minimalist design for my blog without any flashy images that could be distracted. It can demonstrate that I am an organized and detail-oriented person. I chose to use my UBC Blog as web folio because it’s very user-friendly. I can easily upload images and change all the settings and themes to make a unique web folio without any hassles. For readers, the web page is very simple to navigate through.

I was not good at summarizing my best works and write a brief introduction to all of them. With enough practice, I believe I can polish my web folio further to demonstrate my skills.

Overall, this process helped me learn about the essential components of a web folio.

Writing a memo with YOU attitude is a rewarding process. I have never realized that using “you” in a memo or peer review can be rude, condescending, and unprofessional. While practicing writing with YOU attitude, I learned to give suggestions without insulting the reader. This is very useful because making suggestions is essential and unavoidable while working in a team.

Writing a complaint letter and bad-news letter is a good practice as well. Since I don’t have experience composing these two letters, at first, I struggled with the tone and word choice. It’s challenging to be polite but also make my point firmly. I believe with more practices I will be more comfortable writing these kinds of the letter.

I have spent quite some time writing my formal report draft. I have collected enough data in time. However, then I realized my sample is very unrepresentative. My survey is supposed to be for all UBC students and reflecting their thoughts and opinions. Instead, almost 1/3 of the participants in my survey are in Computer Science major. Consequently, the survey results cannot strongly indicate the problem I pointed out. Nonetheless, after adjusting some calculations, the new finding is ideal as it demonstrates the existing parking problem. Thanks to the outline I wrote earlier, I could quickly adapt my contents and add explanations for the unrepresentative sample. Even though I have made a mistake, I believe it’s still a good practice to explain it in the report and adjust the calculation accordingly. Moreover, analyzing other student’s opinions is a fascinating and educating process. I can not only practice my summarizing and evaluating skills, but also learn from other’s thoughts which gave different insights of the parking problem.

As usual, the peer review process helps me reflect on my writings. After reviewing Curtis’s draft, I realized that my introduction didn’t provide enough information to the readers. Curtis gave me helpful advice on my report draft as well. For example, some of my graphs are taking too much white space which makes the report look less coherent. Curtis also suggested me to use bullet points (rather than paragraph form) when displaying a series of statistics. This is a helpful suggestion because statistics can be confusing for readers if they are not listed correctly.

In conclusion, by practicing writing with YOU attitude, I have learned to make suggestions appropriately. After writing my report draft, I also learned to analyze survey results and draft a proper formal report.

James_Ou_Eng301_Formal_Report_Draft