Category: Unit 4

This course has been quite an interesting experience for me as I have not taken an English course in over 3 years (aka since first year). Aside from the occasional email or some long answer portions in assignments, I haven’t done a lot of writing. As a result,  my writing was really awkward and felt pretty choppy. I was definitely out of practice and a common mistake I noticed was that my sentences were overly long and had bad grammar. While I think I have improved on both of these, I still have a lot to work on and need a lot more practice.

The main reason I took this course was to improve my technical communication skills.  I knew that one of my weaknesses was writing so I wanted to get more practice at it. I also wanted to get more practice at doing specific types of technical writing like emails, letters, and reports. Those are all types of writing that I might have to do when I’m working as a software developer and I want to sound as professional as possible. In order to do that, I need to get more experience with writing and that is what I was able to do through this course.

As a student, I believe that I am someone who is hard working, organized and time-conscious.  Those are all important qualities to have when working in the software industry as there is a lot of pressure to deliver and finish all your tasks. Being organized helps you to better plan how you want to approach problems and being time-conscious means that you are more likely to deliver what you need to by the deadline. Those types of soft skills, plus the drive to continuously improve upon my technical skills, are what is going to help me to succeed in my future career.

I thought that the process of creating the Web Folio was very fulfilling. It acts as a summary of all the work we did throughout the term and it highlights some of the best pieces that we have written.

I found that creating the Application Package was not too difficult as I have applied to quite a few developer jobs before and so I already had experience creating cover letters. However, I found the resume styles in the textbook to be quite interesting. Usually, we list out our employment/volunteer history and then state the skills we gained through that position. So I decided to follow the alternate version that is in the textbook and group the information explicitly by my skills. While I am not sure which version is better, I thought the two different styles definitely have their own pros and cons and it was interesting to test both out. I also liked the idea of having a Resume page directly on the Web Folio as I think that would make reading my resume more convenient for some readers.  I have also not yet written letters to request references so I found the examples that were provided int he textbook to be quite useful.

Creating the page with all of our best works was also quite interesting as it gave me a chance to look back on the different stuff I wrote and reflect on which I am most proud of.  I also thought that it was good that the pieces we were recommended to feature were all from different units and were also all different types of writing. This provides an even better overview of my writing ability and it shows the reader how I write in different situations.