Category Archives: Reflection

Unlike many other professional writing mediums like a memorandum or resumé, creating a web folio has a very flexible format. A new site can be exciting to design with so many different possibilities, but the flexibility also means more work to make design decisions. I ended up using a WordPress site to construct this folio.  With previous familiarity, it was the most reasonable option for an online platform. As a computer science student with some knowledge of web technologies, I plan to design a more polished personal website in the future without the help of a content management system like WordPress. This would allow more customization then picking from a fixed WordPress theme.

After crafting the web folio’s layout, the only thing left to do was revise the technical writing samples that I posted using feedback from a professor and colleagues. The goal for these samples is to showcase my professional communications skills to potential employers. It was challenging to reword certain sections and keep in mind some of the technical writing principles that were new to me. On the bright side, now that I know of these principles, it is only a matter of time before I master them.

Writing is difficult. It takes a lot of time to craft something enjoyable to read, professional sounding, and informative. The time taken to write skillfully is proportional to the amount of information that needs to be conveyed. My weakness is not writing often, and with this lack of experience, it takes longer to compose. When a long writing task comes up, I may compromise the quality of my work to finish within a deadline. Sentences are “wordy” because rephrasing to be succinct requires more thought. Pronouns like “I”, “me”, and “you” may appear too often. Despite all this, my writing process has improved after learning to avoid procrastination. During my first degree, I would leave my writing assignments to the last second, leaving little time to perfect them. Also, by starting difficult assignments earlier, they will be finished more quickly. Therefore, less time is spent worrying.

On the other hand, I excel with shorter writing tasks. My one-page letters, memorandum, or emails are a pleasure to read when not written under time-pressure. I am able to maintain a positive, encouraging tone and be concise in all communications. Explanations are clear and carry logic all the way through. Since I am pursuing a future career in science and technology, short technical communications will be commonplace and my strengths will shine. For longer assignments in my career such as formal and scientific reports, there will be more time entrenched in the research beforehand. Since the research will already be done, there will be more time to work on properly synthesizing it into a report. Being more familiar with the field I am writing about will also help a great deal.

The biggest assignment in unit three of ENGL 301 as well as the whole course is a formal report on a topic of our choosing. The only constraint is that the report needs to be written to aid a professional or academic organization. My report is written for the Computer Science Student Society (CSSS) at UBC to be distributed to interested computer science students. The topic is on the negative health effects of sitting for too long. After completing the first drafts of our reports, ENGL 301 students were tasked with peer reviewing each other’s reports within writing teams that were previously formed. I peer reviewed Sidney Singh’s report about maintaining active membership in the Creative Writing Student Association (CWSA) at UBC. This peer review was in the form of a memorandum.

While I have some experience writing analytical reports, I found my report challenging to write. The research on how sitting affects back pain and obesity is filled with conflicting studies. I learned to read systematic reviews in order to get a more complete picture of all the research that was done on a particular question. The whole report writing process taught me strategies to organize literature searches so that they give accurate results. I also learned to plan my writing and research time so that I could finish a large report before a deadline. This report was my first opportunity to create and collect data from a survey. The Qualtrics Survey Tool UBC provided made the process go smoothly. It even helped me create figures for the report.

Giving feedback to my writing team member about their formal report was quite time consuming. I learned that a memorandum is not the best method to advise someone on lots of editing. Since Microsoft’s Word is used to write the report, it makes more sense to use the “track changes” feature. This allows users to suggest edits and add comments to any section within the file. For instance, it would be much quicker to correct spelling mistakes since you would not need to write out the incorrect word, the corrected word, and the location in the report. Despite this, I improved my ability to effectively organize a memo with a lot of disjoint information. There is a lot to say about the first draft of a 10-page report.

Formal Report – The Negative Effects of Long Term Sitting – Phillip Tellier

The second unit of ENGL 301 involved a mix of different writing assignments. We needed to write a list of the best networking practices for LinkedIn, begin planning out a formal report on a topic of our choosing, and create a proposal for this report. Students also peer reviewed each others formal report proposals within writing teams of four. The LinkedIn assignment was designed to hone our networking expertise by researching LinkedIn best practices. On the other hand, the formal report proposal and associated peer reviewing taught organizational skills for writing. It gave insight into how a professional technical writer would make preparations within their organization to write a great report.

While I can see how writing a guide on LinkedIn networking could help some students learn online networking practices, I learned little. As a second-degree student with work experience in a competitive field, I already knew how to use LinkedIn well. Furthermore, I am hesitant to say that any list of best practices can be known as the most effective way to navigate the professional environment. It might stem from a skepticism of the social sciences, but in my opinion the scenarios and goals of people using LinkedIn vary too much for conclusions to be drawn from anecdotes and controlled studies. Best practices depend on what the individual wants to achieve and who they want to appeal to. In essence, I believe each person should act on LinkedIn according to their particular situation, and not strictly adhere to a generalized list.

Most students would agree that a formal report with a minimum of 12 pages is daunting, especially for students in programs that do less writing like myself. Although I conform to this, the requirement for both a formal report outline and a report proposal helped. This required us to get organized by breaking down the task into more manageable pieces. Specifically, we created a schedule of the sub-tasks to complete in the proposal. In this way, we committed to avoiding procrastination and we re-imagined the workload as reasonable. It was difficult for me to decide on the topic of my report, the negative effects of long-term sitting, but once I did it was fairly easy to find subtopics and design an outline.

The peer review I received for my formal report proposal was mostly positive which was reassuring. There were nuanced parts of my proposal that I could have been clearer about since my reviewer did not understand them. For instance, I could have expanded on what is currently known about the long-term effects of sitting, and what I think students know. When peer reviewing my writing teammate’s formal report proposal, I put into practice phrasing my critiques as suggestions. Hence, I am learning to keep a positive encouraging tone. It felt easier than my first peer review. I was also interested to learn about my peer’s formal report topic. She plans to write a report on different types of food packaging to help a local start-up. I look forward to reading the full report.

Formal Report Proposal on the Negative Effects of Sitting – Phillip Tellier
Peer Review for my Formal Report Proposal – Lea Ang Salamanca

The main assignment for the first unit of ENGL 301 is to write three definitions of a fairly complex technical term for laypersons. We needed to define the type of audience that would read the definitions, and for what purpose they would be reading them. This taught students that a good explanation needs to be organized well. Related ideas are grouped and predicated concepts need to come after the ones that explain them. Students helped each other learn by peer reviewing each other’s work. We learned to maintain a positive tone while simultaneously giving constructive criticism.

I decided to use the MLA citation style for citing the sources of my three definitions of bioinformatics. This was the first time I used MLA, so it took more time to write my citations since I was still learning. It also took a while because my citation manager software cited my references incorrectly. “Mendeley” is the program I used. In the end, I manually edited all of my citations to reflect what the MLA guidelines suggested. I used a secondary source from UBC (“getting started with MLA Documentation Style”) to guide me through the process of writing my citations in 7^th ed. MLA, but many of the secondary sources I looked at were slightly different, so I am still unsure if I choose the correct guide. It’s possible that the differences were due to the use of different MLA editions. Next time, I will stick to the APA reference style because I am more familiar and I don’t see any obvious disadvantage compared to MLA. I also like to colour my references so that they are easier to identify, but my peer reviewer suggested they be left uncoloured. I could not find any MLA guidelines that suggested citations be left uncoloured, so it is not clear whether there is either a rule or reasoning for not colouring.

I received a mostly positive peer review from my writing team member which was encouraging. However, it was pointed out that there was a term, “biochemistry”, in my expanded definition of bioinformatics that I did not explain. I assumed it to already be understood. This made me realize how easy it is to forget that not everyone knows something that you have known for a long time. And as someone who was surrounded by other biochemistry students during my first degree in biochemistry, I took for granted that everyone already knew what biochemistry was. I replaced “biochemistry” with “experiments investigating the molecules and cells” since everyone who has graduated high school (my audience) should be able to understand that. This has taught me to be more careful when using terms that might not be common to laypersons, even if they seem basic to me personally.

I actually find it challenging to do a peer review of writing well. This is because there are two requirements for an excellent peer review that are at odds: the need to point out all errors and present your criticisms and the need to maintain a friendly and positive tone. Since these requirements seemed incompatible, I completed my peer review as more of a list of errors and complaints. After reading the tips on the instructor’s blog, I realized how to fix this: instead of saying an error was made, I can phrase each error as a recommendation. Observations of where the author did well can also be added to maintain the positivity of the review.

Three Definitions of Bioinformatics – Phillip Tellier

Peer Review for Three Definitions of Bioinformatics – Noah Saini