Category: Blog

Journey review: Self-assessment

Such an unforgettable journey of study in Technical Writing (ENGL 301) course is coming to the end. It is time to look back on what I have learned in it and do an overall review.

Honestly, at the beginning stage of this course, I was feeling a bit of nervous and anxious. As long as I am not a native speaker in English, I often encounter difficulties in its writing. How to use the most appropriate words and sentences for the expression, how to employ the professional tone and reader centre attitude, how to minimize gramma errors, all these questions are the reason that I decided to take this course. At the same time, they are the major concerns in each of my assignment in this course. It is not easy to put myself stand on the line and face the challenge. However, the benefits brought from this course is incredible after I have overcome these difficulties.

The most significant benefits that I have gained from this course is the pee-review process. Through exchanging and reviewing assignments between team members, a new path of thinking has been opened up. It generates more than the power of just one plus one, but much likely to be an accumulation effect of overlaying the review and reflection again and again. By giving myself the guideline to review other team members’ document and having received suggestions from their reviews on my works, it creates a powerful upward spiral to my writing skills development and broadened my vison in technical writing.

Some major assignments such as the formal report, the application package, the YOU attitude writing, the technical definition, and those reflection blogs are challenging but valuable in developing my writing skills. Precisely because of these, with those peer-review processes, I can more clearly understand my strengths and weaknesses in technical writing. It seems I have rich topics and subjects with detailed descriptions and able to analysis them in a logical flow in my mind. Whereas, to express them in a concise writing style with flexible wording and grammar are being as my main issues for a long time. Being study and practicing in ENGL 301 gave me a lot of inspiration on this issue, and hence made me see those gaps that can break the deadlock.

finally, I want to express my great appreciation to Dr. Paterson, my teammates Zainab, Cynthia, Joanna and all classmates in this course, who are the amazing tour guide and accompanies in my journey in Technical Writing this summer. Thank all of you!

 

The end of the journey: Web Folio

It is my second time to create a personal website independently. Based on the previous experience on creating the student blog of the Technical Writing course (ENGL 301), I can see that I am more familiar with the design of web pages and the layout of their content this time.

Although the previous experience has brought me benefits on creating the web page, I decided to demonstrate the improvement that I got through the study of ENGL 301 course within each content. This gave me a challenging task on the Web Folio assignment. I kept asking myself questions when I was decorating my web folio, such as how should I arrange the layout and those pages, where should be edited on the previous posted articles, how can I provided professional and, at the same time, easy reading information to the reader through the whole folio. I read through those feedbacks from Dr. Paterson and peer-reviews from my team members to seek the solution and place that can be improved.

Therefore, I tried to refine my previous works based on these recommendations from ENGL 301 course and realized that this web folio assignment is acting as a summary to my journey in this course. Comparing the refined works on this new created web folio to those original documents in old version and seeing those best works such as my formal report, it seems watching my posture along the journey of this technical writing course. After completing the web folio, I found myself so proud of it as it is acting as a milestone for such a meaningful journey.

Become more mature on the journey: Formal Report

The third unit of the ENGL 301 course flies much quicker than I through. The major task within this unit was focusing on finishing the draft report and the peer review of it. The entire process of both have brought me a comprehensive reflection on my researching and report writing skills.

The report developed by three main research. Each of them was represented to different types and sources of information. Among those, the field trip, as the primary research source, which was no doubt a challenging task. It is the first time for me to conduct a filed observation and data recording on my own. To setup a plan and prepare the equipment for the field trip is the first and primary step for the researching process. After that, being keen and attentive is the key to gain the most useful messages in the field. At the same time, it is inevitable to encounter and response to the various conditions which may brought from the environment and the climate. The ArcGIS mapping and the population data were acting as secondary sources. The whole researching process for these two aspects are smoot overall. The pivotal idea for these researching processes is to proper select the effective data for the upcoming analysis.

The analyzing step is the main body of this report. The goal of this is to extract the effective information from those prepared raw data sources. And followed by the rearranging and concluding procedure to express the meaningful result. It is really a challenge on technical writing when trying to discuss a result in a concise way within a logic flow. And this will surely become the window for the reader to understand what the report is trying to tell.

Organizing all the puzzles together to combine them as a formal report is a finalizing work. It is of great importance to remind myself when was doing the organization to employ YOU attitude through the entire article. Previous practice on this topic has become an extremely useful experience at this link. By following the instruction from the textbook and reading those hints provided from the Instructor’s Blog, the report draft is completed step by step.

The peer review was playing as its important and powerful role to give me unexpected feedback as usual. By reviewing Zainab’s draft report, I have learned more than how to process a research, analysis and give solutions to improve the voting rate. His concise writing style and the usage in grammar have impressed me each time when I read his article. This would become a valuable reference to improve my technical writing skills. At the same time, Zainab’s review on my draft report gives me an incredibly detailed and useful suggestions which I may not notice by myself in a short-term. It is a shortcut to help me reach my weak points on my writing skills and identify them much quickly.

The course is coming to the end. I think it is the time to focus on the remaining tasks and get to apply those techniques that have been learned from this summer.

 

Adapt from the journey: Report Strategies & LinkedIn Profile

The ENGL 301 course has come to the end of the second unit. Meanwhile, the content within the course schedule was becoming richer and richer, which was bringing me more challenging tasks and various opportunities to strengthen my technical writing and communicating skills.

Creating the LinkedIn profile brings me some fresh concepts on how to prepare myself for social networking. From the research on the best practices for professional networking to actually developed my own LinkedIn profile, each step has pushed me forward in a self-studying process of how to build up my social networking profile. The research was acting as a previously strategy with suggestions, which provided me a “big picture” of how the profile should look like and listed which means would develop the profile on connecting more social networks in detail. However, the actual setup of my LinkedIn profile was not as ideal as what the initial strategy was planning. It is sometimes a puzzle to make the profile both concise and detail, which means the information that showing on the profile must be effectively attracting viewers and recruiters without containing unnecessary messages. This can be applying to each section of the profile, such as a professional looking photo with a clear background, and a concise but convincing summary etc. Even after completing setup the profile by myself, there are still a lot of aspects that I realized can be improved after I read the peer review written by Zainab. This assignment was not only guiding me to setup a LinkedIn profile but also provided me a brief introduction on how to build up my social networking by preparing and managing my profile.

Assignments on formal report proposal have brought me opportunity to experience a complete process on how to prepare and start a formal report writing. The original step is brainstorming, which is mainly focus on topic selecting. The fit the topic to my interest and major in geo-environmental science, I finally chose the topic of researching on forest fire and planning to develop the analysis with ArcGIS. It is to be estimated that the research under this topic can be explored in the report and its outcome through the analysis should be effectively meaningful. The whole research process was believed to be feasible and able to be completed individually. When I was drafting the report proposal, I was not making clear that the primary data sources are the major elements of this research. Followed by Dr. Paterson’s advices, I have make a couple of adjustments on my strategy of the researching process and start to realize that the way to collect, demonstrate and analysis the primary data can be a essentially important skill on writing a formal report. I appreciate the effort taken by Cynthia who provided me a sort of detailed suggestions from her peer review on my research proposal. Specially for the advice that her provided aiming on my method section and gave me hints on how to arrange primary and secondary sources much more clearly.

As I mentioned in the unit one reflections blog, the peer review process is of great helpful to improve my technical writing skills. By reviewing my teammates’ writing, I can see how various that different peoples’ articles can be. These differences can be reflected in their backgrounds, opinions, styles and so on. Moreover, the peer review process is not only acting as an exchanging of ideas, but also as a self-reflection and value-added to cultivate my writing skills. I have learned some different thinking from completely different points of views that I may never thought to write an article. And discovering some errors, especially in grammarian problems and sentence conciseness, which are not easy to be found only by self-reviewing. The cross-action between providing and accepting the peer review brings me a upward spiral effect on boosting my writing skills.

Going through half of this course, I have been taken different adventures and challenges in this journey. They made me to take effort to go through but brought me more benefits on my technical writing skills in return. I am looking forward to seeing what I will learn further in this course.

 

Starting point of the journey：Technical Definition

The first unit of my technical writing journey has been completed. It is an exited start of the course with challenges. And I believe these challenges that I have overcome will become the fuel boosting me forward in this journey.

The assignment of “Write Three Definitions” has brought me an opportunity to introduce a term that familiar to me but fresh to others. I was quite confidence with such a task and thinking that would be easy to handle, until I was actually planning the strategy for the writing in my mind. Then I recognized this was an easier said than done mission. When it comes to introduce a technical term to a person who has non-technical background on it, the task itself is turning into a complicated one. From the three types of definitions to the four expansion strategies, each section was testing my ability on language organization. How to expand the definition from parenthetical and sentences to paragraphs? How to organize the overall structure of the writing? How each strategy can be linked together to explain such a complex term to the audience in detail? Questions like these were keep appearing in my mind and these also acting as a guide for my writing process to achieve the objectives. In addition, that makes me keep reminding myself to stand from the reader’s perspective while writing an article. I first learned that such a self-communicating process leads my technical writing skills to an upward spiral.

I was a bit loss and confuse on the peer review process at the beginning. This is the first time that I formally take the peer review to the writing from other people. However, reading Zainab’s definitions of “bonds” has ease my mind and turning it into a learning process for both the term itself and peer reviewing process. By the guiding of the “301-Peer-Review-form-1” form, I start to realize that the peer review is more than a reviewing process for other’s writing. It is also a reflection on my own writing when I gave suggestions. Some of my weaknesses on writing that were easily overlooked can be emerged through the peer reviewing process. The peer review is highly effective on giving a self-feedback on my writing skills.

The editing of my definitions was completed based on the suggestions that provided by Zainab. I want to appreciate for his serious and meticulous review on my assignment, which I certainly gained a lot of benefits from his detailed suggestions. This gave me feedback that how others are treating my writings. It is noticeable from those suggestions that I have difficulties with conciseness and in correct use of grammar. Suggestions from Zainab’s review may not be easy to come up from my perspective, which it helps me to expand my thinking on how to improve my technical writing skills.

Overall, from both the practice of writing the technical definitions, as well as the back and forth peer reviewing process, I believe that I have received a large amount of ideas on how to cultivate my writing skills. I wish I can get use of these ideas in the upcoming units in this course and apply them to benefit my writing in the future.