Monthly Archives: March 2022

Unit 3 – Reflection Blog

In Unit 3, I wrote a memorandum to Evan Crisp with a demonstration of YOU-attitude. I also completed a formal report draft by researching, organizing, and writing the report on Recommendation for Placing a Clothing Donation Bin at the UBC Bus Loop. Finally, I peer-reviewed Han Li’s formal report draft, and I am currently reflecting on the review and working on my final report.

Evan Crisp You-Attitude

You-attitude allowed me to write and let the reader know or feel like I am looking at the situation from their perspective. It made me realize the importance of emphasizing the readers rather than myself. Writing with this style will help accomplish the paper’s purpose and create a positive outcome even in a difficult situation.

Formal Report Draft

The formal report draft consists of three parts: research and collection, organizing the data, and putting it together to write the report.

Research and Collection of Data

The data collection was time-consuming and was not as easy as I expected since I encountered problems with posting the survey. I started by requesting to join UBC groups on Facebook; however, I still have not successfully entered them and have not posted in those groups. Then I decided to post on a Reddit group since it is a popular platform that many UBC students and staffs use; however, I did not have an ethics board number for the project, so my post was not approved. Luckily, I successfully posted the survey link on a UBC student group chat and a BCS Facebook group and managed to collect a total of 30 responses. Although this is a small sample size, I was able to use the data gathered for my report. In addition to the survey, I gathered evidence from the residences’ sorting areas. The process was quite tricky since I was unfamiliar with the locations and mapping of the residences. Finally, I gathered information from online websites and resources to support my report. Even though much of the information on the clothing donation bin was negative, I managed to find positive information that supported my paper.

Organizing Data and Report

After researching and collecting the data, I organized and created graphs for the questions. Then I used the outline I wrote in unit 2 as a template and started to organize the different sections of my report. When organizing the data, I collected according to the outline, and I realized that there were sections that I was missing and sections that I could change.

Writing the Report

The last step of the formal report draft was to write out the report. The biggest challenge I had was that I always had to keep in mind the attitude I was writing in and the tenses of verbs and pronouns I use. It was not easy since I also had to focus on the presentation of the data and the flow of the whole paper. Luckily, the tips from the professor, the textbook and my outline helped a lot during this process.

Peer Review

This third peer review was for Han from my Writing Team. I have not peer-reviewed her work before and reviewing her work this time was beneficial. Han’s report was similar to mine, but instead of placing a clothing donation bin, her report recommended enhancing the safety protection for on-campus dining at UBC. Overall, her report was professional and had a well-written introduction that describes the report’s background information. From peer-reviewing her report, I noticed that my report could improve by adding a figure section in the table of content. I also received a peer-review from Han and learned that the report was missing important information such as the own scope I listed and needed improvements for my report styling and MLA citations. The suggestions were constructive and made me realize how careless I was to leave out important information.

In conclusion, I did my best to improve my weakness by writing with more details and was able to construct a good memorandum to Evan Crisp, write my report draft and complete a detailed peer-review for Han. In addition, I realized the importance of time management having enough time for each step of a report. Finally, I look forward to writing the final recommendation report by improving my draft according to Han’s suggestion and learning more writing skills in unit 4.

 

Formal Report Draft: ENGL 301 – Lucy Li Final Report Draft

Unit 2 – Reflection Blog

In Unit 2, I researched the best LinkedIn practices for professional networking on LinkedIn, wrote a formal report proposal, and peer-reviewed another individual’s report proposal. After completing these assignments, I learned more about writing and improved my technical writings skills.

LinkedIn

The purpose of this assignment was to write ten best LinkedIn practices to share with my writing team. This exercise was beneficial since it made me aware of the importance of following the many tips for LinkedIn. Before reading the tips, my LinkedIn account only included all the basic information needed for someone to recognize me. However, after reading the LinkedIn tips that the team has written and the ones that I have written, I realized that there are many things that I have left out:

  1. Even though I knew about LinkedIn’s resources, I did not use them because I was unaware that they would help promote my profile.
  2. I did not include a summary introducing myself, my strengths, and my weaknesses. I now understand that this section is important since it can summarize my professional history, qualification, and personality. It allows other professionals to get to know me, especially when they do not have the time to go over my complete profile.
  3. The most important thing I have not done is to add details to the different sections of my profile.

Formal Report Proposal and Survey

The formal report proposal was a piece of writing that I had never done before. Research topics and problems were already given to me when studying for my business degree. However, in this course, I had to choose my research topic, create a research plan to address the problem and provide a possible solution. I brainstormed many different topics: create an app for the Vancouver compass card in order to solve the problem of losing the physical cards; propose that UBC provide COVID-19 pandemic seminars to provide pandemic related information to students so that they can effectively protect themselves and others as well; placing a clothing donation bin at one of UBC’s busy locations to improve the convenience of donating clothes and increase the environmental impact. I ended up choosing the topic of placing a clothing donation bin at UBC’s Bus Loop because I believe this proposal will result in significant benefits for both the students and staff and the environment. Writing the report was straightforward since I had a clear focus on my research topic, audience, solution, and recommendation. The most challenging part of this assignment was to create a survey aiming to gather information from students and staff about my topic. Even though I have a clear plan and schedule on what I will do for March, I do worry that my final report might not end up as put together.

Peer Review

As I mentioned in my Unit 1 reflection blog, I feared receiving and giving feedback from other individuals. I have now completed my second-time peer-reviewing written works from my writing team, and I have discovered new improvements and things I still need to work on. Carol did a good job reviewing my work and providing me with more suggestions in making my proposal better. I was a bit confused with some of the suggestions, but I was able to ask her in person to clarify what the feedback meant. Also, I peer-reviewed Carol’s report proposal and found it quite interesting, especially since it was a problem I could not relate with, but I look forward and hope that the problem gets solved. Her report was very detailed, and this is one of the things I need to improve on. I now learned that my future writings and peer review could be much better if I included more details and avoided being too general.

 

To Summarize, these three activities helped me discover weaknesses and strengths that I can continue to improve on. For example, after completing all the work and receiving feedback from both Carol and the professor, I realized that it is important to provide more details in memos, peer reviews, and other written works. I look forward to Unit three, and I hope I will improve by adding more details and reducing the use of pronouns and imperative words.

Revised Definition: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99c-2021wc/2022/02/16/formal-report-proposal-placing-a-clothings-bin-at-the-ubc-bus-loop/

Peer Review: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99c-2021wc/2022/02/18/peer-review-of-formal-report-proposal-placing-a-clothings-bin-at-the-ubc-bus-loop/