Self-Assessment
Anthony Del Rosario
City College of New York
ENGL 21007 B2
Professor Sara Jacobson
May 21st, 2021
Self-Assessment
Throughout this semester, I have learned a lot and I have significantly improved my writing skills in ENGL 21007. We wrote three papers for this course, a Lab Report Analysis, a Technical Description, and an engineering proposal for an innovation, which was a group project. In this course we have eight learning objectives that would be achieved by the end of the semester. The first learning objective states “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” Objective 2 is “Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” Number 3 explains that it focuses on the part of writing where you “Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.” Learning objective 4 is “Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing process.” Learning objective 5 looks at “engaging in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.” Objective 6 is about “Formulating and articulating a stance through and in your writing.” Number 7 states “Practice using various library sources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.” Lastly, learning objective 8 says “Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources.)” Each of these are helpful for writers and can enhance the effectiveness of a writing piece, and in my opinion, I did achieve most of these learning objectives.
In all honesty I don’t think I achieved course learning objective number 1. It revolves around recognizing the range of linguistic differences and using that to further develop my paper by creating a connection with the audience. The only paper where I really “connected” with the audience was in the engineering proposal where we were trying to appeal to the audience and show off the benefits of our product. This didn’t mention or take into account the linguistic difference between me and the audience. The lab report analysis and technical description were similar as they are purely factual and don’t connect with the audience, so I don’t think I achieved the first learning objective in this course. I definitely see the benefit of using this in a writing piece to make it more effective in getting your point across to the audience, but I don’t recall actually using it in my writing pieces.
Learning objective 2 was very important in this class. Drafting, revising, editing and self-assessment is helpful in improving your written work. We revised in every assignment since the first draft is never perfect. There is always room for improvement, and it’s more effective when a second set of eyes are reading your work. One assignment where this objective was very helpful was the Lab Report Analysis. I honestly had a very hard time at first with this assignment. To be honest my first draft was very bad. My paper was formatted pretty badly and was messy. The constructive feedback I received from my classmates allowed me to revise my paper. They pointed out how I failed to actually answer what the essay prompt was asking and how I focused more on the content of the lab reports when I should’ve been looking at how the authors used the eight elements of a lab report. They gave me suggestions on specific parts of the essay I should focus on. They also gave me advice on how to format my paper better and gave me suggestions from their own paper to help me.
Negotiating my writing goals and audience expectations is something all writers must consider. This is what objective 3 explores. When writing, you must find think about who your target audience is. This is extremely important as it’ll shape your entire essay, including your own goals for the paper. Depending on the audience, you may want to change your writing style. Either you could go for a purely factual approach, or you can connect with the audience on a personal level and connect the topic to yourself. This objective mostly became useful for the group engineering proposal. The majority of the proposal and presentation was factual and explained how our innovation worked. However, this objective really became useful when we were explaining who this product would be for and its advantages. The audience played a crucial role in our Proposed Idea section. Our product is a light dependent resistor that turned on at reduced light levels depending on the amount of light in the surrounding area. We decided it would benefit those who are visually impaired, have a fear of the dark, and those who are seeking to reduce light pollution. We pitched our idea and adjusted our goal for the proposal with that audience in mind to express its benefits.
I also achieved learning objective 4, which revolved around engaging collaboratively and improving on the social aspects of the writing process. We have worked collaboratively throughout the whole semester. We met in breakout rooms frequently to have discussions and work on group assignments. This allowed me to get more comfortable with working with my peers. The Engineering proposal was the main reason I feel that I achieved objective 4. This was our only group project and working together with my groupmates to create an innovation helped me improve my collaborative work skills. This learning objective can also be connected to learning objective 2 since I was also working collaboratively when we did peer review. I was able to receive useful feedback on my work from my classmate and I did the same for their work. This way everyone involved can improve their work.
Objective 5 is essentially talking about using different methods of writing to make your essay effective. Like I said in objective 3, the audience is one of the most important things to consider when writing. I would say I achieved this objective to an extent. Most of the things we did in the class were brand new to me. As I states before, I had never used APA format. I had never heard of the eight elements of lab reports let alone use them to analyze a lab report. I was somewhat familiar with what a technical description contains but I had never written one, and the same goes for the engineering proposal. I had definitely seen proposals for new products before and I did create innovations before for other classes, but I have never written an engineering proposal that went that in depth into them product before. These were all new experiences for me, and in doing those papers, I believe I did explore new methods in to create an effective writing piece.
I always felt like I was good at writing essays when I put the work in to make it good. Part of writing a great essay is making sure you present a stance or position in your essay and make it clear enough for the audience to recognize what is your stance as the writer. This is what learning objective 6 is about. Usually, I mention my stance in the introduction of the essay, and then back it up in the body paragraphs. You can also introduce the topic of the essay and then present your stance in the conclusion or later on in the paper. I did this in the lab report analysis, where I only mentioned the lab reports I will be examining and what about them I will be examining in the paper. I only stated my stance in the conclusion, when I stated that after examining both lab reports, I felt that they both got their point across and effectively used the eight elements of a lab report.
Learning objective 7 was another objective that I achieved. This one focuses on how well I used resources in my work. The sources, I used the CCNY library database as much as possible. When I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I turned to google scholar. I had previously used both of these resources in ENGL 110, but in continuing to use them in this class, I was able to further familiarize myself with them. To be more specific, I had the skills to do a general search on the CCNY library database, but I never used the filter tool before. When we were working on the lab report analysis, I learned how I could filter the search results to help me find what I was looking for. For example, if I didn’t use the filter tool, I would’ve never found any lab reports that I could use within the countless results that came back from my search.
Objective 8 played a crucial role is improving my writing. This one looks at the art of citing sources, something that is extremely important in Writing for Engineering. To be specific, we had to format all three papers using APA format. This included having a cover page in APA and citing all sources I included in my work in the correct format. Admittedly, I was pretty confused on how to use APA format when the semester began. I was so used to MLA format that without realizing it, I mixed both MLA and APA in my rough draft of the lab report analysis. However, the more I used APA in my work, the easier it got to use it in my work. Perdue OWL was a great resource in understanding how to use APA format. I especially used it a lot when I had to cite my sources in the bibliography of my paper.
So, in conclusion, out of the eight course learning objectives for ENGL 21007, I personally feel that I achieved 7 of them throughout this semester, numbers 2 through 8. These eight course learning objectives have advanced my knowledge and skills in writing, allowing me to compose more effective papers that can connect with the audience and make it easier for them to understand my point and position on the topic. This is reflected in the three papers that I completed and submitted for this course, the Lab Report Analysis, the Technical Description, and lastly, the Engineering Proposal.
