Oscar Lantigua
Professor Julia Brown
Writing for Engineering
24 May 2021
For my second semester I took the writing course for engineers with Professor Julia Brown. The main goal she set for us in homeworks, essays, and class discussions we did were the course learning objectives of the class. With her very much appreciated guidance and dedication we were able to explore literacy and achieve the objectives. Therefore improving every student’s reading and writing ability and creating a stepping stone for our next semester of any English course.
When doing our first major assignment of the course which was the lab report, we had to use a youtube video that discussed some sort of engineering aspect and then write a lab report about it. Looking back at it now, this assignment helped us as a class achieve goal number seven of the course learning outcomes which is to “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects”. The way this assignment helped us achieve this was by making us use the internet to become informed about an engineering topic, in my case about concrete support, and create a lab report that covers the whole process. This was very much helpful because as a student who wants to be in the civil engineering field I find it very interesting and useful to know about reinforced concrete. Furthermore, in my career field I will need to know how to use library sources and the internet to do research on future projects I might have. In short it comes down to seeing this course learning outcome as a life skill because people who don’t know how to do this can struggle to find data for any type of work they are doing.
In the second half of the semester we worked on the Technical description assignment, where we had to choose a physical object from today that makes humans life better or just compliments it and then describe the components of the item, explain how they work together, and finally how they improve human development. This assignment I believe helped us achieve the course learning outcome of “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”. In my assignment I chose to speak about stoves and this required me to quote and paraphrase a lot of information from my sources, allowing me to practice using my sources and once again learning another skill for my writing which is important for generally any field you go into. Additionally, I also had to write about the usefulness and importance of a stove based on human needs and in short this was the analytic part of the technical description paper. Therefore, helping us as a class reach the course learning outcome of
The final big assignment and project for the class was the engineering proposal and this assignment truly was the best in terms of impact because it helped us achieve multiple learning outcomes at this point. The assignment helped us achieve goals one, two and four which were in order “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility”, “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment”, and “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes”. This research paper, being a group project, required collaboration in every single aspect of the project even just for preparations and we all revised each other’s work until we felt like it was close to perfect. As a group we exchanged contact information and would have set days to meet and discuss based on what was due for that week. This is a very important and key skill to have because in almost every field, specifically my own, you need to collaborate with others in many instances in order to progress the work and get it done the most efficient way possible. As for the revisions we practiced that skill as a group by looking over each other’s individual parts and making any edits we saw fit and this really helped us receive the grade we got. Therefore, this assignment was undoubtedly the most impactful this semester considering the fact that it reflects most of the course learning outcomes for this semester.
If this course has taught me and the class anything is these course learning outcomes and even though the big assignments were the most impactful, there were other small assignments like discussion boards and homework assignments that covered every course outcome. Generally, this class, thanks to Professor Julia Brown, prepared us for the next possible english class or even for our future career fields. In my case it prepared me for both since I want to go into Civil Engineering and this class was the perfect stepping stone to begin my journey towards my ultimate goal.
