I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating a Web Folio. It allowed me to express my creativity and passion for content building. It was probably my favourte assignment this term. To complete the Web Folio, I took a trip back to the beginning of ENGL 301 and remember my journey in this course. I reflected in the various ways that I grew as a professional writer, and of course, areas of improvement going forward. I had many challenges throughout this course, but it was all worth it due to the numerous lessons learned. The Web Folio assignment was like the Spotify Wrapped or YouTube Rewind of ENGL 301!

Reviewing my past assignments a month to two after definitely gave me a fresh take on those pieces of work. I can see clearly more than before the weaknesses in my writing and where I could have done better. At the same time, the current assignment highlighted my best works too and helped me remember the effort I put into them to achieve the outcome. It made me happy to have worked so hard in completing those assignments.

Recreating my blog into a more asthetically pleasing, better put-together Web Folio that even people outside of ENGL 301 may enjoy is incredibly rewarding. The job I chose to create my application package on was for a content creator position, which I am very glad I picked, because it is genuinely a position I would consider applying for.

In summary, the Web Folio does a fantastic job of wrapping up the course. It gave me something beautiful and permanent to look back on after I complete ENGL 301.

The focus of this unit was researching, organizing, and producing the formal report draft and peer reviewing a partner’s proposal. These were novel and insightful experiences for me.

Formal Draft Report

The researching part of my report included collecting primary data via online survey and review of secondary sources. Collecting the primary data was really challenging for me. The subjects of my research are psychology undergraduate students and despite psychology being my own major, I do not know a lot of other psychology majors. To collect responses, I sent a link to current and previous FaceBook group chats of psychology courses that I was apart of. I initially tried to aim for 20 responses, however I only managed to get 11 responses. I think this was very challenging for me due to me being shy and socially anxious. I would have felt more comfortable if I had a partner for this report. Besides this issue, the rest of the researching process went smoothy. I found many articles that offered insight into my topic. Because I felt more confident in my secondary data than my primary data, I put more emphasis on my secondary findings in my report.

This has been insightful for me because when I am writing research papers in psychology, it is really important to have a large sample size and the data analysis process is often rigorous. However, I learned that the feasibility report for ENGL 301 is exactly not the same a research paper in psychology. For the feasibility report, I am trying to convince my addressed audience that a certain problem exists and that my proposed solution is feasible. Despite the imperfections of my primary data collection process, my report acknowledges the shortcomings, has solutions to limitations, and can show the addressed reader how the advantages are greater than the limitations. Because of this, I believe my formal report is viable and will interest my intended audience.

Peer Review

The peer review process was a pleasant challenge too. My partner’s report topic was extremely interesting and well-written. My partner was gracious in reviewing my work and helped me understand how I can improve, for instance better formatting my graphics for better readability. I will be sure to implement my partner’s suggestions for the final report.

ENGL-301-Jenny-Li-Formal-Report-Draft

As someone who has always been interested in building social media presence, learning how to properly use LinkedIn was a very relevant experience. I discovered how to make a competent LinkedIn profile, how to stand out on the platform, and the steps to take in order to effectively use the platform to build relationships. After this assignment, I became more aware of the importance of LinkedIn and this motivated me to be more active on it even when I am not job-seeking.

The 12-15 page formal report seemed like a long, daunting task at first. However, the step-by-step process has help me better control the process and my schedule. My first report proposal was surrounding issues at my workplace, however, after feedback from my instructor, I went with a better topic that is more suitable for a formal report of this nature. I believe this new topic will offer more for me to write and research on, however I still have worries about whether I will be able to have enough material to reach 12 pages. Hopefully, with the addition of visuals, headings, and bulleted lists, 12 pages will end up being a reasonable length.

During the peer review process, I learned a lot from Catherine Yu’s proposal. Catherine’s proposal was very articulate and well put together. Her research topic was interesting and relevant, and the stated process is well thought out. Compared to her’s, my first proposal was lacking. Reading and peer-reviewing Catherine’s work really helped me develop a better second proposal. From the peer review process, I learned not only to edit my peer’s work, but it also aided me in producing better work myself.

All in all, unit 2 has not only helped me develop my technical writing skills, I learned valuable social and job-seeking skills as well through the LinkedIn exercise.

Please find the link to my revised proposal and outline below.

Proposal: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2021wa/2021/10/21/formal-report-proposal-5/

Outline: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2021wa/2021/10/29/formal-report-outline-2/

Learning to communicate professionally is challenging, yet important to successful writing. Through constructing parenthetical, sentence, and expanded definitions of a technical term that I am familiar with, I gained experience learning about each of these types of definition. The goal was to craft these three definitions for a non-technical audience. This assignment challenged me to consider the readers’ point of view in my professional writing and how I should adjust my writing to cater to them.

After constructing my three definitions, I received detailed and consctuctive feedback from Darius Zhang. During the assignment, I found it challenging to differentiate each of the definitions and write them in a way that caters to the needs of the audience. However, after feedback from Darius, I understood how to make my parenthetical, sentence and expanded definitions different from one another. By adding examples to the expanded defintion, it became more discriptive and easier for the non-technical audience to understand.

I found Darius’s definitions of “Dao” very informative. I was impressed by his poetic writing style and the engagement I felt reading his assignment. Despite his lovely writing technique, in certain areas, it is unprofessional when writing technical pieces such as this assignment. The overusage of direct quotations for example, made the definitions feel less personalized. Additionally, while Darius’ definitions were easy to understand, but get straight to the point, there were still some repetitiveness that may be cut out so that the writing is more conscise. While editing Darius’ work, I realized that his errors could have easily been made by myself. The editing process helped me become more aware of the areas of improvement I suggested for Darius and I hope to put my own advice into use in my own writing as well.

Overall, this assignment was helpful in teaching me a new writing technique that I never knew about before. The peer review process not only gave me editing experience of peer writing, it also helped me be more conscious of the possible errors I could make in my writing as well.