When I began ENGL 301, I considered myself to be a decent professional writer and communicator. I banked on my professional experience and thought writing resumes, emails, or reports would not pose a challenge. With the onset of my first peer review, I soon realized that I had a couple of weaknesses and a lot to learn about my writing style.
Targeting the audience
My first and biggest weakness was how to write for a target audience. I was so attuned to creating and responding to emails that I faced difficulty writing to other audiences. My text would be all over the place, I didn't use the YOU approach, and my writing would be in an imperative tone.
Peer reviewing helped me immensely in this regard as it was a practice that I had never done. It allowed me to be a reader for others' work and then have my work assessed through a critical lens. As peer reviewing was done frequently throughout this class, I began to learn and unlearn a lot about my writing style and have watched it improve since.
Including Details
Another weakness of mine was not including details in my writing. This weakness became more pronounced when I had to write a proposal for my report. I began by choosing a topic which I was not interested in, and hence I could not include details about it. After reviews and recommendations from my instructor and peers, I re-did my proposal, focusing on a different topic and introduced detailed information to make it engaging.
As a result, I am proud of the report I created and uploaded to my collection of Selected Work.
Closing Thoughts
As this final reflection blog comes to a close, I find myself thinking about the various ways in which my writing has improved over the semester. As I speak English as a Second Language, each writing task forced me to be introspective and align my thoughts to translate well on paper. I have learned multiple writing styles like YOU attitude and technical reports, which I believe will help in my future endeavour of being a Software Developer.
I am grateful to my instructor, Dr. Erika Paterson, for providing guided and encouraging feedback. I am also thankful to my writing team, The Writers who Leap Through Time, for excellent teamwork throughout the course. I am glad that this Web Folio will always remain as a reminder of our journey in ENGL 301 Fall 2020.
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