Following up with the English 11000 class, the writing for engineers course syllabus and assignments were alike to what I have seen. I was confident that it would be like taking a walk in the breeze. There were five major assignments in aggregate: Formal Letter of Introduction, Technical Description, Lab Report Analysis, Final Project, presentation along with their following self-reflection essays over the course semester. I was better acknowledged with the writing style and grammar from my previous English course. However, what was expected from an assignment was more developed, specific, and rigorous than I expected. This made my walk in the breeze change to a rough road.

The first assignment I received was the Formal Letter of Introduction. The purpose of this assignment was to know more about yourself, your achievements, and future challenges and expectations from the engineering course. I put in a good effort but could not properly address the main prompt of the assignment. There were also some grammatical errors. I understood how important peer review and proofreading the assignment with respect to the prompt was.

Self Reflection assignments accompanied every assignment except the Formal Letter of Introduction. It was an extra assignment that helped reflect the course objectives achieved from each assignment. It helped acknowledge the objectives that were learned from doing each assignment through this English semester.

The next assignment was the Technical Description. It forced me to find proper evidence for each of my claims. The historical background of the item needed citation, paraphrasing, and referencing. Researching authors with .com websites and their profession and bias were one of the basic tasks required for this assignment. As there is a possibility of it being not credible unlike .gov or .org websites. This assignment taught me which websites are reliable. The assignment was tedious but not as hard as expected; it was just like another research paper but with more technical jargon explained in a simpler manner acknowledging the linguistic differences of a common person and techy. The course objective of negotiating your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of rhetorical situations, as the purpose of this was to make the technical definition of the item more understandable to the common people. This forced me to decide and limit more on which audience to address and how to change the writing plan.

The longest assignment was none other than the Lab Report Analysis. The assignment required the analysis of two lab reports based on the elements required for a lab report mentioned in Markel’s Technical Communication book. Finding lab reports in my field of study as hard as many were too long or hard to comprehend. I had to research many library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate credible and appropriate lab reports for my writing projects. This was the course learning objective achieved from this assignment. This assignment gave me a good knowledge of the tools required to find credible sources and evidence with respect to my assignments. This assignment also had lots of editing, revising, and self-assessment along with strengthening the use of sources.

The final project for the course this semester was a group project and presentation. The group had to come together to find an invention that solves a problem. My communication skills were enhanced with this assignment. Acknowledging others’ linguistic differences was addressed thoroughly during different conversations with the group. This was clear from the contrasting American English and Indian accented English conversations that were happening. Additionally, the course objective of developing a collaborative writing process was clear from the group work. Finally, the main course objective addressed in this assignment was formulating an argument through your writing.

The feedback from the multimodal composing on my assignments from peers and the professor was one of the most important things that I learned from this course. All of these molded me into a better engineering writer than I could ever imagine. Not only the structure and grammar, but I improved in addressing the prompts more carefully with proper revising, sourcing, proofreading, and citations.

My writing skills improved throughout this semester after receiving notes from all my assignments. From my assignment from the beginning of the semester and my recent assignment, I improved a lot. I improved my sentence structure and my grammar. However, recently I make an outline for every assignment I receive because it keeps me writing about one topic at a time. Outlines are a great way to start an assignment. I started writing outlines after the Memo because that was when I had to write longer assignments. However, there is still a lot left to improve in my writing and hopefully, after each year, it will get better.

Overall, even though I had a jet start, breaks, ups, and downs followed my path in this English course. However, throughout this course, these tedious assignments and ups and downs helped me grow as a person with better knowledge of writing more appealingly and efficiently. I can proudly say now that the course was indeed a blessing in disguise in that it taught me to write more qualitatively rather than beating the dead horse (writing the same info) for quantitative purposes.