A Letter To A Person With Similar Hopes and Dreams

Dear Fellow Engineering Student,

In the STEM field, you may feel as though “English” does not matter in your field. Within my love for the STEM field, I began to realize that writing will still continue to be an essential part of my life and that there really is no escape. In my major of civil engineering, accuracy, relevance, and getting my ideas through to my audience is vital. Building upon my writing strategies throughout my assignments in college will create an outcome of success in my desired career. Each assignment for Writing for Engineers allowed me to build upon my writing strategies and get a sense of what genres an engineer deals with in their career.

My first assignment in this course was a Technical Description essay. The prompt of this essay was to choose a simple functional item or a piece of a larger item, of a specific brand, and describe its mechanical and process descriptions. Initially, I felt very stuck and had no idea what object I wanted to focus on. I wanted to write about something a practical object that I use on a day to day basis. After our class discussion, I chose a contact lens, and this event raised a lot of curiosity because few people are aware of how this tiny object really functions. When typing out my first draft, I learned many thinks about the ACUVUE Brand Contact Lenses and just contact lenses as a whole. Writing in the APA format came across as a challenge since it was my first time using this style. However, my efforts came out successful since I barely had any edits from my professor and classmates. A common problem I come across in my writing is using correct grammar and mechanics. This issue has become easier to handle overtime but the processes of reading, drafting, revising, and editing have helped me catch these mistakes and learn to not repeat them again.

The next writing assignment was a Memo. In this assignment, we had to identify a problem or issue on the City College campus that you think could be improved or that I wanted to explore a little more, or something that could be a positive addition to the campus. I had to come up with and address this issue in a clear and formal matter. I had a clear idea of what topic I wanted to do but had trouble coming up with the way to execute it since I did not have any knowledge of what a Memo was. Luckily, by using our English textbook and various library resources, I was easily able to locate examples of a Memo layout and how it is written. By doing this I was able to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts. I received positive feedback from my peers and professor once more but there still was room for improvement.

Other than the common grammatical errors, I had to tone down some sarcastic sentences so that my stance would remain neutral. An example of this is in the Discussion portion of my Memo, “Sadly, our devices do not have an external battery life, forcing us to charge them, so that they may last.” To fix my sarcastic tone I took out the word “sadly” to make the sentence more objective. By doing so, I formulated and articulated a stance through and in my writing. I took the advice of my professor and learned that exposing a situation does not help you argue a point efficiently. However, I did make sure to strengthen my sources by using practices like researching, evaluating, integrating, quoting, and citing sources. These practices allowed me to create a powerful argument and good in text citations. In a Memo it is very important to make your points clear and concise so that the person or department you are writing to feels your passion and need for change.

The third assignment was a lab report. Lab reports are very common and essential for a STEM student in both college and for the future. The main purpose of a lab report was to present scientific or engineering research. The chosen research question is the foundation of your entire report, so it is important to choose it carefully. I chose to focus on a past lab report on an experiment that I conducted in AP Physics 1. This experiment was based on whether a correlation exists between the operation of a backpack strap and the physical concept of harmonic motion. I had the lab report written out in advance, but I did have to reformat and write up an abstract. An abstract was something new to me since I have never written one up until this point. Similar to a summary, an abstract focus on the entirety of the experiment and includes your hypothesis. It is basically used to keep the reader interested and brief them on the lab report. After submitting my first draft I developed and engaged in the collaborative and social aspects of writing process. My classmates read through my report and made sure to let me know whether or not I was being clear enough in each section. Clarity is very important in this case since some lab reports focus on complicated topics. My lab report did just that but by using the physical concept of harmonic motion. After positive feedback from my classmates and professor I edited my final draft with their suggestions in mind. This was the assignment where feedback regarding my clarity, report structure and word choice was very useful.

The last assignment was the Engineering Proposal and Presentation. For this assignment I along with my 4 group members needed to produce a written proposal for a creative engineering innovation. The written portion was then followed by a collaborative oral presentation of the same proposal. We started this process by voting on the best Memo topics in the class. I was fortunate enough to be chosen and soon after the voting my group was formed. It was very important for us to work as a team and acknowledge our range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility in our final proposal. As project manager, it was very important for me to determine who will be responsible for which project components. Luckily my group members worked well together and already had parts that they would like to fulfill. In the writing component we followed the common structure of the proposal provided to us by our textbook and made sure to come up with strong statements in each section. To develop these statements, we reached out to Facilities Department of City College to present them with our ideas and any questions we needed answered. The Facilities Department played an important role in this whole process because they gave us realistic answers to our questions and a realistic approach to how this proposal would be handled. In the end we combined all our strengths and created a well written proposal that suggested the installment of outlet indicators onto the electrical outlets in the NAC library in order to facilitate in timely responses to electrical outlets in need of repair. While presenting our findings and final statements we felt as if we were engineers out in the working world.

The course learning objectives allowed me to become a better writer through each assignment and helped me see that there are many elements that go into the writing process. My writing is a representation of myself, and by assessing my own growth, I have the most accurate depiction of myself to present to my future audience and employers. Writing for Engineers allowed me to get a glimpse of my future.

Best of Luck,

Gabriella