In my English 21007 course, I had gained a vast array of experience in the use of technical writing. Technical writing is much different than the writing typically seen in academia, in which academic writing focused on relaying thoughts on paper, similar to speech. Technical writing however, puts more focus on readability and communication. The change in focus has given me insight as to how one should view writing and what it truly is.

During the course, I would come across the course learning objectives; goals planned out for the student to come across but understand as the course came to a close.

The first objective was to acknowledge myself and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. The lab report analysis was used to introduce the objective by having the student read a lab report, understand the purpose of the report along with how the author comes across. The student then attempts to make an analysis of the report by putting the details in the students’ own words in order to evaluate the strength of the lab report. Not only was the lab report useful in the first objective, it was useful for the seventh objective. The seventh objective was to practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects. To find a suitable lab report to analyze, I had to use library resources such as an online database to find articles on the topic I was interested in. With information being in the palm of people’s hands, it is only natural to use it when sources can be found online.

The second objective was to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. All of the assignments done in the course was useful in achieving the second goal but the technical description was the strongest in this aspect. The reason as to why the technical description was so useful is because during the process of completing the assignment, I had to read on the facts and details of laptops, carefully draft a description describing the main points of the laptop, revising and editing how the information should be displayed such as turning a paragraph about the pros vs cons of laptops into an easy to read grid table. The whole process was all while, I had to carefully self- assess myself and focus on clarifying any points or terms written. In addition, the technical description was useful for the eighth objective, which was to strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources). When collecting information, I had to continually create sources for them to avoid plagiarism. I would also try to summarize and paraphrase if possible because it gives the writer a chance to decide how should he/she write; whether to be brief in delivering information or instead be precise.

The third objective was to negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. The memo was best in meeting this goal. For the memo, I had to negotiate my initial goal of modeling the assignment as a persuasive essay and expecting the audience to be interested.  That later changed into making a document that was quick to the point, focused on listing problems and solutions to the financial problems of City College and changing the medium from a persuasive essay to a document that closely follows a typical memo format. The memo was also very effective when understanding the sixth goal. The sixth objective was to formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing. In the memo, I had to take a stance that City College should be more conservative in their spending. To make my position clear, I had put focus on all the problems that occurred due to the ineptness of some of the officials and explained that not spending egregious amounts of money would be best in the long term.

The fourth objective was to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. The proposal focused on this objective. During the creation of my groups’ power-point and technical description, most of the time was spent discussing with group-mates as to how to divide the work, how to integrate all of the details gathered or would my group and I have to omit some information for the sake of time for the presentation. The social aspects of the writing process was the same as the one used in academia except that in technical writing, the group focuses on strengthening the readability and effectiveness of the document being written. The proposal was also very effective with the fifth objective which was to engage in genre analysis and multi-modal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. The proposal was at first small notes on loose-leaf about details on an improved ID system. The writing soon expanded into a multi-page document and then the use of it to create a presentation. As I explored to different mediums to talk about ID systems, I realized that despite some details and such are omitted in one document but not the other, but the central idea takes the most focus.

During the course, as I encountered the eight course learning objectives, my views on writing has changed. Writing is not just the use of relaying your thoughts but instead writing is meant to be an efficient way to communicate with other people. I had noticed in the assignments. The instructor always put focus on the audience and who would likely look at the different types of documents presented. The way writing should be seen, is that it is an evolution of  effective communication. To get a point across, people would rather do it with speech but it is also to get the same effect or better with a technical document because elements such as images and the different mediums are incorporated with the document. There was a lot to learn in English 21007 and it changed how I see the writing process because there are a multitude of factors that can change how people communicate to each other.