BUILDING UP FORMAL REPORT

The unit mainly focuses on researching, organizing, and writing draft for the formal report, which is a long and challenging process. I find data collection to be the toughest part since not only I had to distribute the surveys, but also provide MATH 1150 students with visual notes as a review material for their weekly quizzes. For the best quality, I used SAI (graphics editor software) to create the notes. Each note took on average 4-5 hours to make, which was reasonable since there were many steps to go through: summarizing the materials for the quiz, creating the draft of the note, rewriting the note on the computer, proof-reading the notes, submitting the notes to the MATH 1150 instructor, who would later distribute them to the class. To familiarize myself with making visual notes, I researched on some methods and tips for visual note-taking. This process was also quite time consuming since there were many new terms and notetaking techniques that were foreign to me.

Because my initial plan was to distribute the survey after the last quiz, which was after the draft due date, I didn’t have much to write except the table of content, introduction, and a summary of the notetaking technique that I used to write the visual notes. For the recommendations/conclusion part, I only listed down recommendations I personally would give after observing the content of the note, and common suggestions from research articles about visual learning.

“In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn” – Phil Collins

As always, the process of writing peer review made me realize many important things that I had forgotten to double check before submitting my work. For example, while reading my teammate’s work, I realized that I had omitted YOU-attitude in my draft, especially for recommendations part. I was also not aware of APA-style header and sub header guideline and did not put any definition on notetaking techniques that might be foreign to the audience, as it was to me before.

Overall, this unit has taught me a lot of things in writing a formal report, both during drafting and peer reviewing process.

Attachment: ENGL 301 – Lani Diana formal report draft