3:3 – Reflection Blog
For the penultimate unit in our ENGL301 course, students started writing a draft of their formal report, building off the work from previous weeks’ report proposal and outline. The majority of this unit focused on writing the formal report draft and peer reviewing our fellow student’s work. In this reflection blog, I will reflect on the process of researching, organizing, and writing the formal report and the task of reviewing my peer’s work.

Research for the Formal Report
From my perspective, the work involved with this formal report is very similar to my experience in the research field. As I’ve first-authored two scientific publications and co-authored several others, I applied the lessons learned from those experience directly to this formal report. First, I started off with data collection by conducting background research on home thefts, security measures in condominiums, and distributing a link of my survey around my condominium. In regards to the background research, this process was very familiar to me so I found it quite simple. I have lots of experience in finding scientific articles and know how to effectively read through them to find the ones that are most relevant to my topic. I used the UBC library page and google scholar to find scientific articles. In regards to the survey distribution, while I had it prepared and approved by the Professor already, I have to confess I was a bit nervous sharing it with so many individuals who live in the same condominium as myself. I was unsure how my survey would be received by fellow residents and if anyone would take the time to respond. Luckily, my building manager is very friendly and allowed me to put up my survey link in the clubhouse, local bulletin board, and the elevators. This really helped me to spread the word about my survey and to my surprise, I received many responses to the survey.

Writing and Organizing the Formal Report
Before I started writing, I first collected all my survey results and cleaned all the raw data. Following that, I analyzed the data with previous scientific findings to see if my proposed solutions would be feasible. It was very interesting to see correlations in my data with other research and that helped determine the validity of my conclusions.

After I completed my data analysis, I started organizing the different parts of my report to make sure everything was laid out in a logical manner. From my own knowledge and experience, I knew to start off with an introduction, lead into the data section, and then finish off with some proposed solutions and a conclusion. For this formal report, I also ensured to include a cover page and a table of contents at the start. Creating a skeleton of the formal report draft helped me lay out a foundation of what I need to write and pinpoint where I should begin.

Then came writing process. While I have written scientific publications many times in the past, it is never an easy process and I find it difficult each time. This formal report draft was no different. It may perhaps just be my personality because I always find myself debating each word utilized, thinking of different ways to structure all the sentences. In addition, I tend to stop and re-read past sentences to see if I made any mistakes or if I can improve anything. This causes me to spend a prolonged amount of time on papers I write. However, this time around, I did find it a bit easier having created an outline and organizing my paper beforehand. This helped map out my thoughts and I knew where to focus my ideas.

Peer Review of Formal Report
For the final part of Unit 3, we conducted a peer review of formal report from a team member in our writing team. Once again, I found this process to be immensely helpful and overall, it has been such a valuable learning experience. I learn so much from these peer reviews and it is a shame that I most likely won’t be able to have this opportunity in workplace settings. When doing these peer reviews, it gives me the rare opportunity of comparing my work to someone who has been given the exact same task. While I am reading over their work for any mistakes, I can refer back to aspects of my own work to see what I can improve on. I may also catch some mistakes I made in my own work while correcting others. I had the chance to work with Jordan again and it has been such a pleasure working with him through this course. He always provides great feedback in his peer reports to me, and I constantly learn from editing his work. This time, from reviewing his formal report draft, I learned how to properly paginate my own formal report and how to make my data figures more visually appealing.

Link to Formal Report Draft: ENGL301_Formal Report Draft