This reflection is an overall self-assessment of my performance in the course. I describe some of the challenges I faced, as well as some of the positives gained from this experience. I also discuss on how I feel my skills line up against my future career.

Overall Assessment

Overall I found the technical writing course to be very rewarding. I do not have the opportunity to work a lot on professional writing, even though it is a fundamental part of what I do at work. The course had many assignments that gave me the opportunity to continually work on my skills. For example, when the “YOU” attitude style of writing was presented, I had many assignments thereafter to practice the style. The assignments started off simple, such as writing a small email memo offering advice. Larger assignments were gradually presented, such as the peer review of the formal report that required the deployment of the “YOU” attitude.

Weaknesses

I have found through writing many assignments in this course that my vocabulary is limited, and my sentence structure is repetitive. I have noticed that reading other people’s work is helpful to develop different ways to formulate sentences. I found that peer reviewing was a good exercise to help me cultivate a variety of sentences, and also aided in broadening my vocabulary. Sometimes I find that I awkwardly word a sentence or description that my peer reviewer may revise for me.

Sometimes I have difficulty using the correct tense. I can catch most of my mistakes by revising my work many times over a couple days.

Strengths

I think that I am very proficient in prioritizing my work. Being aware of impending deadlines helps me to organize day-to-day tasks and keep a calendar of which work I need to complete by a certain date. Acknowledging that my work needs to be finished in order for my peer to review my work, adds to the urgency of completing my work on time.

My writing flows the best when I am familiar with the writing topic. This is true for my formal report. I found that everything came together quite naturally because I spoke with many professionals about composting, and by working at Statistics Canada, I have a good understanding of how the internal policies work.

Future Career

I believe the skills I have developed at school and at the workplace have assisted in the career I want in the future. Currently, I would like to work in the field of data science, since it is a hot field that combines both Statistics and Computer Science. My degree aligns perfectly with a job in Data Science, and I am accommodating my course schedule at school to consider courses such as Computational Optimization and Data Mining that are relevant to a career in Data Science. My previous and current work experience all involve data analysis and data manipulation, which is applicable to my career. I am fortunate to have opportunities to work in the field of my studies, and also be able to apply my classroom learnings in the real world.

This course has also been beneficial to my future career. The documentation that I write in the workplace needs to be articulated carefully with details; however, I always have to consider who my document is written for. According to the audience of my documentation, I tailor the specifics of the report to the audience’s technical background.

Web Folio reflections detail the process of creating my Web folio.

Planning

I created a storyboard in the early stages of planning. The storyboard helped me place headers where I thought made the most logical sense and also helped me to decide on what kind of hyperlinks I wanted to include on each page.

Part of the planning process also included how I wanted visitors of my Web Folio to navigate my site. For example, including links to lead readers of my Web Folio to certain pages was crucial for me. After reading my home page, I want readers to visit my LinkedIn profile, which contains up-to-date information about my data science experiences, or my best work in the technical writing class.

Editing

I always find that editing work a day after I have written it, is much more effective than trying to write and edit all in one day. Editing took the longest amount of time. There were many components of the Web Folio that needed to be revised and edited to ensure no typos or grammar errors. Overall, I was able to catch some grammar errors, and sentence structure problems in my previous work by reading them many days after writing them.

Perfecting

Creating a Web Folio that is visually engaging is challenging. Too much text can make the Web Folio appear boring; however, finding appropriate images to accompany the text is difficult. For myself, my field is very technical, so most visuals I’ve created in my own work involve graphs to visualize data, or process flow diagrams that describe a workflow. I feel that both of these types of visuals do not suit the atmosphere of my Web Folio. In addition, most work that I have done in the workplace, I do not own the rights to, so incorporating examples of my work in the workplace is not possible.

Unit 3 reflections look into the process of researching, organizing and reviewing my formal report. This post details any problems I encountered while collecting data, and anything I learned from the collection or interview process. It chronicles my writing process of the report and the self-awareness I gained from reviewing my peer’s report.

Researching

The primary research (survey and interviews) went smoothly. I had a higher response rate my survey than anticipated. Even though all questions were voluntary, every person who answered the survey, answered every question. I had some doubts about how I can formulate my results into facts, since my sample is not representative of the Statistics Canada employee population. I also had an interview with the City of Ottawa Community Garden coordinator, Joshua. The interview went smoothly, and Joshua was able to answer all my questions in detail. I found it challenging to write down everything he was saying, but was nonetheless was able to jot down some memorable information, such as what he envisions Tunney’s Pasture to be like with a community garden.

Overall, the secondary research part of the report was difficult to find certain information. I was looking to find basic information about composting, as well as some composting facts. There were many news articles about composting, but it was hard to find any peer-reviewed articles that contained the basic information that I needed. Statistics Canada and the City of Ottawa were good sources to find statistics related to composting, as well as the City of Ottawa was a good source to research the current composting initiatives in the city.

Organizing and Writing the Formal Report

I did not find organizing my information to be too difficult. I mainly relied on my Report Outline that was posted on the team forum as a guide.

As mentioned, I found it difficult to formulate my results from the survey into meaningful results, since my survey sample is not representative. All results are displayed in terms of the respondents, but none of the results can be generalized to the Statistics Canada employee population. I find that without this, the survey results do not help make a convincing argument. Asides from that, I found my interview with Joshua to be very eye-opening. Since he knows a lot about community gardens, he told me that my original idea of having organic waste diverted to community gardens would not work due to the volume of waste. Instead he offered an idea where some of the waste could be diverted, which I was able to articulate the idea in my recommendations.

Brewer park community garden in Ottawa (credit: Gardens Ottawa)

Reviewing

I still find reviewing my peers work to be helpful for my own writing. I noticed that sometimes in my peer’s work, there are some organizational or transitional weaknesses, which were existent in my report as well. Noting these also helped me to identify my own mistakes in transitions. The peer review is also helpful when there is a template. For example, the template Dr. Paterson provided us contained questions about content, organization, style, and design, that were all useful for self-editing. Every point in the template I could use to assess my peer’s writing and my own report.

Unit 2 reflections look into the process of creating a LinkedIn profile, developing a formal report proposal, and reviewing each other’s proposals.

Creating my LinkedIn Profile

Making a LinkedIn profile is something I have wanted to do since I started university. I am glad this course gave me the opportunity to create a profile, as well as have feedback from my peer to make my profile better. The process went relatively smoothly. I found that writing an engaging bio is challenging because you want to present yourself as professional and charismatic using a minimal number of words. The information in most sections, such as the Experience and Awards sections, were brainstormed from my recently updated resume. Overall, the process was enjoyable and rewarding since LinkedIn is a great platform to build a professional network and showcase your skills to potential employers.

Report Proposal

Overall, I think the progress of my Formal Report is going well. The brainstorming part of finding a suitable topic for the report proposal was a challenging task. Since I am away from my home city (Vancouver), I thought it would be difficult to write about a community I am a part of at home, in case I needed to be onsite. Therefore, being limited to communities I am a part of in Ottawa, Statistics Canada seemed to be my only reasonable option. However, there were deficiencies at work that I thought of, where elaborating on them may be a breach of confidentiality. In the end, I chose to write about composting, since as a whole, the city of Ottawa lacks behind Vancouver in terms of efficient organic waste management programs. In the early stages, I questioned how I would cultivate this problem to become a 12-15 page report, but now that I have completed my formal report outline, and begun my research, I think I will have enough information to form a convincing list of feasible options for composting at Statistics Canada.

Peer Review of Partner’s Proposal and Peer Review Process

In general, I believe that peer reviewing my teammate’s work has been beneficial to my writing. By reading over my peer’s work, I can find some styles and techniques that work well and some that don’t work as well in my partner’s writing. By finding attributes which I may like, and may not like, I am able to improve my writing by incorporating techniques that work well, and avoiding ones that do not work well. Specifically, from reading my partner’s proposal, I found that establishing a target audience first is important because all background information and any necessary details will be central to the audience. Something I enjoyed about my partner’s writing style is that it is very meticulous, but never off topic. I found that I can understand other people’s work better when their writing provides more details, but also gives sufficient background information about the topic of interest. Overall, I have enjoyed giving feedback and receiving feedback from my peers who can offer a different perspective about my writing.

This reflections blog contains my thoughts and experiences while writing a technical definition for a non-technical audience and the peer review process of the definition assignment.

Original writing

By writing the first draft of the definitions for my chosen term, algorithm, I realised the importance of choosing a term that is easy to define without using technical jargon. In particular, I researched several different terms (in the Statistics and Computer Science field); however, many of those terms required a strong mathematical background to understand. Terms which are along the lines of abstract concepts, rather than physical objects, seem to be more challenging to describe to a non-technical audience. I learned that using the UBC library commons to research my definition was also challenging in the sense that I could not find peer-reviewed articles that revolved around an introduction to algorithms. While writing my original draft, I reflected on a time not too long ago, when I did not know what an algorithm was. During that time, I remember I was just starting out in computer science and reading articles that utilized very simple language was crucial. I learned that when writing an expanded definition for a non-technical audience, comparisons to situations which the audience may be familiar with can be very useful to elaborate in the definition.

Peer Review Process

Through reading Jamie’s writing, I realised that I can be more specific in my own writing. I found it helpful to edit someone else’s work for many reasons. One is that it allows me to incorporate some of the stylistic flavours used by my peer in my own writing. Another reason is that reviewing another person’s work allows me to identify parts of his or her writing that does not flow well and learn from his or her mistakes. I enjoyed reading Jamie’s work because his writing is very technically sound. Jamie expanded well on his definition and included visuals in his expanded definition that aided in his description. Through the peer reviewing process, I get exposure to a writing style that is different from mine.

Editing Process

Jamie gave me excellent feedback. Looking at his peer review, I agree with almost everything he suggested about my writing. I agree that I need to expand more on my original definitions, and that my original expanded definition lacked structure. I found this exercise very useful to help edit and improve my definitions. I learned that I can write much better when I have someone that gives good constructive criticism. After receiving the peer review and while editing, it became much easier to expand on my examples, and it also became easier to construct a logical flow to my writing for more concise organization. In the editing process, I learned that my writing is much better if I start early, and continuously revise and make additions to my work over several days, rather than write everything all at once.

My final definition assignment after making changes based off Jamie’s suggestions is included in my best work on this website. Please take a look here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/nancywuwebfolio/best-work-in-engl-301/