‘Writing for Engineering’ course has improved my writing strategies and abilities and helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses as an English student. I was quite nervous about English class and writing at the beginning of this semester because I felt that my work was simply not good enough like others. But as we started working on the assignments, and read through each other’s works I felt like no one’s writing is perfect. There’s always something that needs to be worked on. This motivated me to work hard on my writings and develop new skills as much as I can. Throughout the semester I have worked on different types of essays or assignments which required different types of skills. These essays have encouraged me to write better and helped me feel more secure about my skills. In this essay, I will discuss some of my writing’s strengths and flaws as well as how my style has changed throughout the semester. 

Through this course I significantly improved my reading, drafting, revising, editing, and assessment techniques. I realized that producing professional writing requires patience and time. Other things I learned through this class are the value of drafts, the most effective way to avoid improper writing is to use drafts. Also I found that revising and editing removed the errors and greatly improved the clarity of my writings. My writing audience is typically determined by the prompt and the idea I’m trying to convey, so negotiating my personal writing aims and audience expectations about genre, medium, and rhetorical situation standards was relatively successful. In terms of the audience’s ability to understand my work, some of my writing is adaptable, but sometimes my writing style leaves out part of the readers. My ‘Engineering proposal+presentation’ assignment was an excellent approach for me to learn and participate in the social and collaborative parts of writing processes. In addition, I used the CCNY online library  in order to collect sources for my writing projects using a variety of library resources, online databases, and the internet. Also lab reports strengthened my research strategies as well. I got to know about lab reports, how to study them, how to find important information from them, what they should look like etc through my second assignment, “Lab Report Analysis.” I strengthened my usage of sources and citation by working on the assignments, but mostly by the assignment, “Technical Description” which required a lot of research and source. Also this course gave me a clear idea what the APA format and citations should look like. Before that I wasn’t that much familiar with this format as I used to work with MLA format. In my writing, I really showed that I am capable of effectively summarizing, paraphrasing, analyzing, and synthesizing data from a range of sources. All of these, in my opinion, demonstrate the development of my writing over this course.

In conclusion, I can say this course gave me a brief idea of what professional writing should look like. And how much dedication and focus it requires. This semester has given me the opportunity to write effectively and figure out what makes writing special and beneficial. Also it demonstrated the more we work on things, the more skills we get to achieve. I have learned a lot throughout the semester and I’ll try my best to learn more. And I am so happy how this semester turned out.

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