Monthly Archives: October 2021

In unit 2, our task involved researching a LinkedIn profile and preparing a report proposal and outline. Through these tasks, I recognize the importance of finding one’s purpose for any task, choosing the right audience, and time management in writing workplace documents. 

While researching making a LinkedIn profile, I recognized the similarity between managing a company website and a LinkedIn profile. One of the reasons for my previous catering company’s success was finding the right audience for the company’s website. By consistently making time to manage the website through observing how my company’s clients look for caterers, I discovered that always linking and tagging three pieces of event photos with the venues were the most cost-efficient way to attract customers to the company website. Managing a LinkedIn profile works the same way. After setting a goal, determining a target audience, and creating a profile, one must commit to improving one’s profile consistently. There are various strategies that people can use for using LinkedIn, depending on their goals. I noticed that people who found success using LinkedIn were committed to making the social networking site work to achieve their goals. Building a good profile and achieving networking success takes time and effort. 

I found brainstorming and creating a report proposal a challenge. Assessing whether or not the topic that I have chosen was appropriate for the length required for the formal report is difficult. I found the instructor’s comments about my chosen topic helpful. This experience stresses the value of consulting experts when doing unfamiliar tasks in the workplace. However, in a real workplace scenario, helpful comments are not freely given; one needs to learn how to ask for feedback from experts. I find that the exercises in this class interweave politeness into sentences which people with advanced academic degrees appreciate. Learning how to write correspondences such as memos is an advantage that I can include in my workplace toolbox when communicating with an audience with advanced degrees. 

Reviewing my peer partner’s proposal was a good opportunity to practice writing how to give feedback. It reveals how writing feedback requires a different set of writing skills compared to writing literature reviews. Considering how my peer partner will interpret the tone of my peer review of his work was a good challenging experience. I appreciate how the peer review examples were broken down into different categories, making it easier to create feedback systematically. My peer’s review of my report proposal helped highlight my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. His feedback showed my tendency to miss details towards the latter half of the proposal. Having opportunities to write workplace documents in this course, such as making report proposals and creating formal reports, helped identify the skills that I need to improve as a writer such as checking details and improving my vocabulary and grammar. Creating concise sentences is one of the skills that I intend to improve on in the future.

Writing the outline for my formal report highlights the importance of organization and time management. I do feel overwhelmed by the formal report and creating deadlines for each task reduces my anxiety as I go through this course.

Overall, Unit 2 highlighted areas where I am skilled at such as knowing how to set concrete goals for a website and selecting the right audience. Those skills can be applied in technical writing. In writing the report proposal and creating a peer review, I realized that I need to improve writing different workplace reports and practice writing concisely.

Enclosure 1: Revised report proposal  Formal Report Proposal_LASalamanca 2

Enclosure 2: Peer review received for the proposal https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2021wa/2021/10/16/peer-review-of-vegetable-packaging-formal-report-proposal/

In this unit, our task is to choose a complex term within our profession for a non-technical audience. I decided to define Vitamin K to online readers without a science background. My purpose is to encourage the audience to increase their Vitamin K intake after reading the post.

Writing process

Having a clearly defined purpose and audience was the most critical task in the writing process. It helped me select the appropriate words, length, and methods of expansion for my definition. I chose to give a brief history, food sources, functions and visuals with bold captions to help the readers remember the key features of Vitamin K. As a nutrition science student, the definitions and functions of vitamins in the lectures, journals, and textbooks use scientific terms. Choosing the right words to define Vitamin K that people without a science background can understand was challenging, and I found myself veering off from my focus a few times during the task. I had to remind myself of my paper’s purpose several times while writing the expanded definition to ensure that I only included details that would not confuse the readers or make them lose interest in reading the whole document. 

Peer review process

I found receiving and giving feedback insightful in the peer review part of this assignment. As an ESL student, I have always thought that people with no science background understand the word “coagulation” because there was a word in Filipino that directly means coagulation that we often use in cooking. However, my peer review partner pointed out that people without a health science background may not understand the word coagulation and suggested a different way of defining the word coagulation that my intended audience understands. I found her suggestion culturally insightful because I realized the complexity of the English language and how asking for feedback could help me find the right words to reach my target audience. My peer review partner also gave me useful feedback regarding the consistency of my use of labels which helped me realize how small details matter in improving my writing.  As for giving feedback, this assignment helped me understand how organizing my peer review of my partner’s work into different categories such as clarity, organization and layout made my peer review look polite, formal and professional. 

Editing process

Having the opportunity to edit my work helped me realize my strengths and weaknesses in technical writing. Overall, I conveyed my message about Vitamin K to an online audience well by using plenty of visuals that help the readers remember its function and food sources. However, I realized that I needed to slow down and check that the details in my document such as visual aid labels and sentence structures were consistent throughout the document during the editing process. After editing my work, I found that the consistency in the format of the final document made it look more professional and helped me convey my purpose to my target audience more effectively than the first draft of this assignment.

Overall, I found that this exercise was a good learning experience. Reading the textbook was very helpful in breaking the task of writing definitions and peer reviews. I could apply the writing concepts smoothly, and I am eager to use the writing guides as a reference in my future courses and work.

Here is the link to my edited post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2021wa/2021/09/29/write-three-definition-by-lea-ang-salamanca/

Here is the link to my peer’s review of my assignment: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2021wa/2021/10/05/peer-review-of-vitamin-k/