The Self-Assessment Essay is a kind of research paper. Your writing development is the subject and the writing itself is your evidence. As you write your Self-Assessment Essay, you’ll be referring to the works you’ve included in your Portfolio. This essay answers two questions: To what extent have I achieved the course learning objectives? In what ways have my perceptions on what writing is and does evolved this semester? This essay will thus provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate how you’ve developed as a writer this semester and will serve as an introduction to your Portfolio.
The Self-Assessment Essay
As I venture into the journey of self-assessment, I find myself crossing upon my reflection and ambition. This self-assessment essay serves as a middle ground in which I reflect on my strengths, weaknesses, and the transformative experiences that have shaped my personal and professional growth in the Writing for Engineering course this semester. Coming into this course, I had yet to learn that writing varies throughout different majors and fields. The stuff taught throughout my other courses for English class must relate to the writing and choice of words in engineering. I thought wrong, and my experience with various engineering papers this semester allowed me to grow beyond the basics of writing. This self-assessment essay will illustrate and analyze the extent to which I have achieved this course’s learning objectives and how my perception of writing has evolved. Throughout this essay and my analysis, I aim to demonstrate my writing growth and provide detailed information to my portfolio.
One of the primary learning objectives of this course was to develop a range of linguistic differences, enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment, negotiate your own writing goals, Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, engage in genre analysis, Formulate and articulate a stance, Practice using various library resources, and strengthen your source use practices. These learning objectives were developed by writing an essay for an assignment, such as drafts, peer review, and final drafts like the Lab Report and the Technical Description assignment. At the beginning of the semester, my writing needed more strategies for a well-structured draft, such as “Lab Report Analysis.” I could have done better with time management, but structuring a draft for this essay made me realize the point of a draft isn’t to prove the work is on the way to being completed but how precise my evidence and reasoning are. However, as I progressed from learning my mistakes and improving on enhancing strategies for reading, drafting, revising, and editing in peer review comments like “you can expand more on how they used other research to build on and how important that is to an introduction of a lab report” and “How did they organize the raw data? was it most to least important, charts, graphs, etc., just push on whether or not it helped you better understand the report”. Through understanding my issues in the “Lab Report Analysis” Paper, I have developed a strategy for reading, drafting, revising, and editing. My “Technical Description” Essay improves the structuring of my draft, focusing on detailed and related information to convey my thoughts and make the final draft and future assignments more straightforward for my audience, peers, and future peer reviews.
Another crucial learning objective was to recognize the range of linguistic differences as resources, drawing on them to develop a rhetorical sensibility. In the initial drafts of my ‘Lab Report Analysis’ and ‘Technical Description’ essays, the peer reviews I received from my classmates were instrumental in helping me understand these linguistic differences like “Try not to forget to include the author/s for the cited lab report” and “a suggestion is to divide the section into exterior and interior parts.” Using that opportunity for learning opportunities has not only improved my writing but also enriched my understanding of the diverse perspectives in our class.
Throughout the semester in the course and understanding the course learning objectives that I have achieved and improved on as a future engineering student, my perception of writing greatly influenced many of my papers and assignments. My perception of writing changed throughout the reading responses assigned, which made us read and learn lessons on technical communication and how to practice those communication skills in engineering writing, like letters, lab reports, technical descriptions, and proposals. For instance, in the homework Reading Response #3 “In Chapter 9, I plan to incorporate a subtopic in future works in Writing for Engineering: Writing Clear, Informative Paragraphs. I believe it’s essential to understand how to successfully develop an informative paragraph.” as a future engineering student, these reading responses made me reflect on the skills I have developed from the textbook chapters and how I would use those newly gained skills in technical communication in my future works in this course and my field.
Moreover, understanding technical communication through the homework reading responses like Reading Response #1, “Even though I have not yet acquired that much experience in my major in college, being an architecture major in high school and participating in a handful of group projects, not only did my group have to follow instructions, but we also had to communicate and promote our ideas to the higher position.” The homework and lessons taught me individual writing, collaborative writing, and projects. The Practice of group work in peer review and group discussions that allowed us to share multiple perspectives and cooperative aspects of writing was critical in the final group project, “Engineering Proposal.” The importance of writing in group projects was one of the elements that significantly changed my perspective on writing. It challenged my peers and me on our improvement and journey through learning objectives in our essays and writing perspectives, as the assignment now collaborated with our skills and struggles.
In my experiences in writing essays like Lab Report Analysis, Technical description, and engineering proposals, there are some achievements that I still need to achieve throughout the course. One is to Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects and strengthen your source use practices. In the “Lab Report Analysis” final draft, I struggled to understand my source/ lab report, which also affected how I practiced using that source in my paragraphs. Going through that struggle made me acknowledge that you always understand the sources you are using and how important they are in the essay.
In conclusion, Writing for Engineering this semester has altered my perspective on “what writing is.” Before coming to this course, writing was a vast topic. The idea of writing generally comes from my experience in regular English classes, like learning what literary devices are and how to write an essay. However, that all changed throughout my assignments, achievements, and struggles in the course as it widened my perspective on writing, specifically for engineering, and how writing skills vary through fields.
