This semester has been quite a journey for me as a technical writer, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect on my progress thus far. A multitude and a variety of assignments were written this term, ranging from memos, to a formal report, and even a web folio. Although some people would not think this is a lot of writing, by volume it’s the most I’ve written in several years by far!

At the start of the term, we (students in the ENGL 301 course) were tasked with setting up our blogs and forming writing teams. Although I was uncertain what tasks we would need to complete as a team, or how this would work, I am extremely grateful that I had the chance to work with this team! I was provided with some very insightful advice, and in exchange I provided my best advice as well. Over time my peer reviews for my team definitely showed improvement. My first peer review before revisions was quite difficult to read with its blocks of text. By the last peer review I already memorized the content structure and kept important writing tips in mind, such as maintaining the “YOU” attitude, avoiding negatives, and re-phrasing pronoun sentences. In addition to improving the quality of the advice I could provide, I also learned how to format it in a way that is easy to read and clearly actionable.

Other assignments provided plentiful learning opportunities in a variety of formats. The wide range of technical pieces of writing I wrote strengthened my ability to keep a professional tone while being succinct, and deliver information in a way that is most beneficial to the reader. Some of these works include the formal definitions, analytical report proposal, report progress update, the report itself, and business letters. The advice I received from peer reviews and instructor evaluations allowed me to strengthen my writing across a wide range of media. I’m confident I’ll be able to manage any type of technical communication I need to write, even if it wasn’t explicitly part of this course.

Lastly, all aspects of the formal report were very helpful in improving my writing abilities! I think these set of assignments (the proposal, outline, progress update, and final report) had the biggest difference between the first draft and the final edits with peer reviews taken into consideration. Even seemingly small things, such as the introductory paragraph for a survey, was new to me, and I certainly learned a lot!  I’m very proud of the resulting analytical report and related writing, and I think this is a good way to show the iterative skills I gained along the way! A Statistics professor even expressed interest in the results of the report, so I made it as genuine as possible.

Lastly, I would like to express tremendous gratitude towards my group members, who were a pleasure to work with and provided thoughtful, detailed advice. Without them I would not have progressed as far as I have in this course.

In this post I will take the time to reflect on the process of creating a Web Folio, one of the final assignments for ENGL 301. This was a nice way to tie several other assignments together, by hosting the Application Package and showcasing several other revised works.

The application package was the largest update to my Web Folio, and a significant amount of work to put everything together. This exercise allowed me to update my resume, write a cover letter for a job I applied to, and write requests for references. Although I haven’t been asked for references recently, I’m sure the day will come and these letters will be sent out! I also learned how to change some of the properties of my website to customize it to my liking, and to fit the standards in the Technical Communication textbook. I’m happy with the result and I think it’s a good presentation of my personal brand! The page showcasing examples of my written work nicely summarizes the assignments completed this semester. It was fascinating looking back in time, revising my work from earlier in the semester, and witnessing the improvement.

The Web Folio can be found here: https://teetertater2.github.io

The third Unit has largely helped consolidate some of the things I previously learned with new techniques, such as the “writing with YOU attitude” methods. The formal report draft and peer review were excellent opportunities to practice these techniques!

The process of researching and organizing the formal report was trickier than I expected. I was happy to see that 49 students responded to my surveys and my professors were supportive when I posted them to class discussion boards. However, once it was time to draw inferences from the results, it was rather challenging to produce a clear narrative and logically connect the answers to the survey questions. Data analysis techniques proved useful and I’m glad that I have experience aggregating data– otherwise this would have been even more difficult! I was thrilled to find significant differences between the responses of students majoring in Statistics vs other majors, but I think there is more work to be done in analyzing the responses. Writing the first draft really forced me to think through the recommendations and how to relate them to the data obtained, although it is still very rough.

I had the pleasure of reviewing Tarandeep’s formal report. Since I have seen some of her previous work and know that she historically does a great job of following the formats specified, it was positively reinforcing to see that we shared many similarities in how we formatted our reports. I find that it is always a useful reference point to see the work of my peers. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of her report also allowed me to reflect on whether I had taken those elements into consideration in my own.

Overall I found this unit to be very fast-paced and a bit difficult to keep up with next to exams, but useful in pacing the writing of the report. Being confronted about how the report can be improved has brought, and will continue to bring, new ideas between now and the final submission.

Formal Report Draft
Formal Report Draft Review for Tarandeep

Unit Two concluded just as quickly as it arrived — I can’t believe how fast time is passing this semester! Now that’s it’s over, I’ll take a moment to reflect on my experiences with the assignments.

Creating and maintaining a social media network is thrown into focus each time I am looking for my next opportunity, and my attitude toward it changes every time. When I created my profiles during my first job search, I did not have very much content to publish, but still attempted to stretch my participation in clubs and volunteer experience to tick the boxes of a “complete” profile. Now that I have more projects and work experiences to display, I gladly take the opportunity to present my work. Furthermore, by reaching out to others in hopes of receiving a referral or insight into the industry, I made a few friendships as well! Some strangers on the internet have become my colleagues, co-workers, bosses, and friends. My least favourite aspect of having a professional social media presence is having to update every page (LinkedIn, my website, AngelList, Xing, etc) following career/project changes, but luckily their formats are similar enough to permit copy-paste. Researching the best practices for LinkedIn profiles and networking has inspired me with further ideas to make my profile better, which I have incorporated into the most recent version of my page.

The Formal Report aspect of ENGL 301 kicked off with a formal report proposal. At first I misunderstood this to be done in groups, and once I came up with a report idea, I was hoping my team would like it. As it turned out, the reports are individually written, and thus I would begin writing about “Lecture Capture Systems in the Statistics Faculty at UBC.” This was a fairly straightforward assignment, but fitting my idea to the format in the textbook was still a challenge. As the report has progressed and the survey responses are being submitted, one question/challenge that I am facing is how to aggregate the survey responses into conclusions– so far the responses are too few in number to make any firm conclusions.

Since I’ve had the opportunity to do a few peer reviews now, I can feel that I’m getting better at writing them! Excluding personal pronouns, keeping them short, and also being informative is very challenging when writing the reviews, but also very satisfying to read once they are complete. This is a format I enjoy both on the sending and receiving end! I always value when others take the time to review my work and there are always helpful suggestions to improving my writing.

Overall, I enjoyed this unit of the course and I’m looking forward to future assignments. The gradual steps to writing the report make the whole project less intimidating, peer reviews are a tremendous help in catching mistakes and providing helpful advice, and the LinkedIn portion is already helping me on my job search.

Below are links to the revised Formal Report Proposal (following peer-review), and the peer review itself.

Formal Report Proposal Revised

Peer Review of Formal Report Proposal by Tarandeep Atwal

As the first unit of our technical writing course comes to a close, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the writing assignments, the peer-reviewing and editing process, and what I learned from them. I usually don’t have many opportunities to write structured texts, and I possibly wrote more over the past month than the four before that. I’m grateful for this opportunity to practice, and I’m confident that I will solidify my skills by the end of the semester.

For the definition assignment, I took quite a bit of time to decide on a word to define– it had to be a bit more technical, so that it would require a definition, but not too obscure that I could not explain it without having to define other words. Eventually I landed on “machine learning.” As a data scientist by profession, I have thoroughly researched this field and I keep up with the latest advancements within it. Nevertheless this assignment posed a challenge, specifically how to summarize it effectively and briefly to a nontechnical reader. For this my sources came in handy, especially two books that are popular in the machine learning field. I decided to include a visual to better-illustrate reinforcement learning, one of the sub-fields I included in my definition. For this I was able to use an animation from a personal project. Although I created it, it still posed a challenge to explain what exactly was happening in it. Overall, I think the definition was a success, and my peer-review partner praised it in her review.

Priyanka Patel was my peer-review partner for the assignment, and we reviewed each-others’ definitions. I think this is an extremely helpful process for improving writing skills, as it highlights the weaknesses that the writer may have missed, and grants a second perspective to the writing. In Priyanka and I’s case, I think this was particularly helpful, because I have no experience in the dental field (her definition was related to the dental field), and as far as I know she had no experience with machine learning. Both her and I were able to identify some words and phrases that may have been confusing to a non-technical readers outside our respective professions. As English may not be Priyanka’s first language, there were a few recurring grammatical mistakes. Fixing these mistakes was the easiest suggestion I gave, because it was the first thing I noticed when reading her definition. I had more difficulty providing suggestions about the phrasing of the sentences, because although they did not quite sound right to me, I could not pinpoint what she had to change in order to fix them. After a bit of thinking, I wrote a few examples to her about how rearranging the order of the words and limiting the sentences to one subject could improve the readability of her sentences. Since I learned English at a young age, I never had to address my own grammar, but this process definitely helped me turn abstract ideas into concrete ways to improve writing (including my own).

In return, Priyanka wrote me an excellent review of my definition. Although she gave it a lot of praise, she highlighted important things that I had missed. After reading her perspective and looking back at my writing, I definitely agreed with most of her suggestions. For example, the description of the image I provided was too vague, and I had done the caption incorrectly (not following MLA format). As well, despite thoroughly checking my own writing, she was able to spot a grammatical mistake I had made. However, I decided not to add another paragraph to the expanded definition as she had suggested, because she commented on the number of paragraphs but not which content was missing in her opinion. I found the editing process very interesting and helpful, because of the added perspective and useful advice that I can improve my writing with.

If possible, in the future I will always try to have a friend or colleague proof-read my writing before I post or send it, because the editing process may reveal crucial mistakes or simply provide good suggestions! After receiving the peer review from Priyanka, I’m very satisfied with the updated version of my definition of Machine Learning. Below are links to both the definition and Priyanka’s review.

Link: Edited Definition
Link: Peer Review

To: Priyanka Patel <ppatel45@alumni.ubc.ca >
From: Yury Zhuk <yuryivz@hotmail.com>
Date: September 20th, 2019
Subject: Forming an Engl 301 Writing Team Together
Attachments: 301-Yury-Zhuk-Application-Letter.docx

Dear Priyanka,

After reading over your application letter and blog, I am interested in forming a writing team with you.

I was impressed by your five years’ professional experience and I believe the interpersonal skills you developed would be a great contribution to our team! Furthermore, I respect your contributions to the community in volunteering as a youth leader. The types of communication skills that leading groups of youth requires will no doubt aid in written communication as well. Lastly, I value your desire to improve on your communication skills, and I have the impression that you will be a motivated team member. For these reasons, I would like us to form a team together.

Please consider my offer to form a team and let me know what you think! I am including my own application letter as an attachment for your reference. I am best reachable at this email address.

Best Regards,
Yury Zhuk

301 Yury Zhuk Application Letter Word Document