Hello everyone! The purpose of this blog is to host content that I will submit for the ENGL 301 technical writing course. This course teaches different forms of professional communication, including writing reports, memos, proposals, and more. The course will also cover how to communicate in the workplace through various media.

From this course I hope to build a foundation of workplace skills that I can bring forward into a future career. I already have some understanding of workplace communication. In a previous position, I was in a customer service role where I constantly needed to communicate professionally with the public. I needed to answer emails from customers and answer their questions at the front desk and over the phone. This gave me some foundational practical knowledge of how to communicate professionally. From this course, I would like to build upon these skills by learning more about other forms of professional communication between co-workers. For instance, I do not really have any knowledge of how to write memos or proposals. I have written a report for work, but it was somewhat informal. I would like to understand how to write a more formal report. 

I also expect this course to provide a better understanding of how to professionally collaborate. In my limited experience, workplace collaboration differs from typical school group project collaboration in important ways. In school, it is usually assumed that all group members will contribute approximately equal amounts of work and receive equal credit. In the workplace, team members contribute according to their role and the time they have available to contribute to the project. I wish I had known this in my previous workplace before beginning a collaborative project. From the group projects in this course, I hope I can get a better idea of a “workplace” environment.