If You’re Reading This, I’ve Made It Through: A Journey of Learning through Writing for Engineering
By: Quamel Lewis
Before taking this course, I considered myself a decent writer. At the end of the course, I’ve learned that I can surpass decent. I have completed various writing assignments throughout the semester that have developed me as a writer. Individual writing tasks such as the resume, cover letter, and lab report allowed me to practice drafting, reading, synthesis, information literacy, and citations as per the course objectives. The group proposal project and technical description included collaboration with other students, further usage of citations in APA format, reading while researching, and synthesizing multiple sources to create one thorough and organized body of writing. All writing assignments, including the introduction paragraph, taught us to consider the various audiences and purposes of our writing, teaching us to format our writings to easily comprehended by the reader. Each writing project has helped me to develop my skills as a writer and to achieve the course objectives for this semester.
My first writing assignment was to build a resume and cover letter for an actual job position. Although I have a resume, I hadn’t written a cover letter before, so this was my first time writing one. For this assignment, I had to search for a job opening and identify key words to match with the skills and experience listed on my resume. I chose to create my resume for a civil engineering internship with the New York Power Authority. As I was completing my resume and cover letter, I revised my first draft by trying to list my qualifications as concisely as possible. It was challenging trying to balance what I should write in the resume and cover letter in comparison to the skills desired in the job posting. My final draft still didn’t fit on one single page for my resume or cover letter as recommended, showing that I needed to better prioritize which information to provide to the hiring manager, the audience, for the purpose of getting selected for a job interview. Formatting my writing to be concise and effective was a task that persisted throughout the other major assignments of this course.
My first major research assignment was the “Lab Report” about dice probability. For this report, I needed to hypothesize about the results of rolling two dice 100 times and compare the results to both my hypothesis and another scholarly study. In the beginning, I met some obstacles as it was my first writing assignment since I returned to CCNY. My first obstacle surrounding this assignment was researching on a scholarly level, marking my first use of CCNY’s online database. While conducting research for this assignment, I prioritized the use of peer-reviewed scholarly articles, leading me to two articles used in my report as credible sources. As I combed through my sources to gather relevant information to compare my results, I began to develop a sense of information literacy. From reading the abstracts, as well as the chosen articles, I ensured that the purpose of each article aligned with the topic of the lab report.
The second major obstacle I met was using citations in APA format. Prior to this assignment, I had only used MLA format for citations, so adjusting to an entirely different format was challenging. Oftentimes, I worried that I was citing my sources incorrectly as I was struggling to grasp when it was proper to include an in-text citation. While gathering my sources, I used the provided citation generator on the database website to build the “works cited” section of the report. Additionally, I referred to external sources, namely “Purdue OWL,” for further guidance on in-text citations. Overall, completing the lab report as my first research assignment further prepared me for the upcoming assignments in the course.
The next major assignment was to create a group proposal for a new student center. During this assignment, I collaborated with four other students to create a group proposal presentation. We began by brainstorming feasible locations for a new student center. As a group, we initially considered renovating the current center at Wingate Hall or creating a new building on campus. After considering each other’s ideas, we ultimately decided to repurpose the Howard E. Wille Administration Building. For this assignment, we conducted primary research by surveying students’ opinions about the current center and suggestions for improvement. We also conducted secondary scholarly research to support our proposal. As we assigned different roles to each other, I decided to research the costs of construction and the benefits of a modernized student center. For this project, we combined scholarly and real-world research to strengthen our proposal. We cited peer-reviewed articles explaining the benefits of student centers on other campuses, and realistic costs of renovating a building in Manhattan. Through synthesizing our sources, we developed our argument that our proposed student center would benefit City College, calculating a total budget of construction and profits from increased student retention.
As we were writing the proposal, we considered the audience & purpose at different points. For example, as we were conducting our research, we made sure to include information that was both accurate and persuasive since our purpose was to convince the audience to accept our proposal. Additionally, we provided visual aids through the technologies of Microsoft Office, using PowerPoint to present information and Excel to chart and graph our data for cost and benefits. Considering our audience of students and our professor, we formatted our information to make it digestible, making our PowerPoint presentation concise while keeping the necessary information. In the final stretch, we completed rough drafts of our bios, and we revised each of our bios for grammatical errors. We also revised the initial draft of our completed proposal to have a uniform writing style. Lastly, we used the APA format to cite our sources throughout the proposal by using in-text citations and listing our sources in the “works cited” section.
After the group proposal project, we were tasked with creating a technical description about a topic of our choice; our topic was the New York City Subway system. Similarly to the group proposal, this assignment was a collaborative effort with one partner instead of a group. During my research, I was able to expand on information literacy through using various types of reputable sources: scholarly articles, journal articles, newspaper articles, and video documentaries. I synthesized the different sources to complete the history portion, as well as the physical specifications, of the subway system. While researching this portion, a lot of reading was involved since the system is rich with background history surrounding its construction and expansion over time. Due to the overwhelming amount of information, I initially found it challenging to condense my findings into more concise bodies of text, a task comparable to the presentation for the group proposal. For the presentation aspect, we considered the audience & purpose of our technical description, and we adjusted our presentation styles to allow the audience to understand the operations of the subway system. Since this was the purpose of our assignment, I formatted the history section as a timeline of major events, leading the audience through several milestones surrounding the system’s construction. I also formatted the technical aspects of the system in bullet points to make it easier for the audience to digest in the short time we had to present to them.
At the beginning of the course, we wrote introduction paragraphs to give a brief overview of ourselves. Our audience was the other students in the class, and the purpose was to foster connections with each other that would help us to successfully complete the course. This helped me to choose the partners for my group assignments and assure that we would work well together in completing the proposal and technical description. The course objectives learned through the group projects and individual work were reflected in the Quest. The experience I gained in drafting and revising these works, taking into consideration the audience and purpose allowed me to correctly punctuate the problem sentences to make them clearer for the reader.
In summary, I have improved as a writer through the course objectives outlined in each writing assignment during the semester. The skills learned from the initial writing assignments are carried out through each subsequent writing project, building upon the previous assignment. For example, learning to write concisely without sacrificing important information started with completing my resume and cover letter. As the course progressed, I practiced concise writing through the presentation of the group proposal and writing the technical description. Although writing essays may be limited to classroom settings, this course has shown me the importance of writing more proficiently and the objectives learned in this course can be applied to my future writings in real world settings.
