Evolution of My Writing Skills: A Course Reflection

Throughout this course, I greatly improved my writing through the projects I did in this course and successfully fulfilled all the course learning outcomes of writing and designing, reading and analyzing, researching and documenting, and the use of technology and media. This course helped me improve my organization in my writing and helped me learn to be more specific to help get the point of what I needed to communicate across faster. The following sections demonstrate how I fulfilled the course learning outcomes and how I grew as a writer through this course.

Writing and Designing The first learning outcome, “Writing and Designing,” states that we must demonstrate the ability to write effectively as individuals and in teams in the standard

As time went on, my writing moved away from the creative writing I did throughout my career as a student and begin writing as a professional whose main task is to get to the point. This was clear in the beginning where we were tasked to write a course application email. In the email, my first line was, “I strongly urge you to accept me into the ENG 3050 Technical Communications course.” If I had not read how to write a memo before I sent, I would’ve filled the email with pointless content attempting to make the memo flow. Similarly, in the introduction for my project plan memo, I wrote, “The problem that I would like to research for my technical report is the graduation rate at Wayne State. More specifically, I’d like to show that if college and school is run less like a business and more like a place that fosters education, the University will be better overall. Because of high tuition rates, stresses of retaining aid, and insufficient management of the institution, Wayne State’s students suffer from high dropout rates and low four-year graduation rates. If Wayne State University were to implement new policies which change

This was apparent in two projects, the two-component report and the wikiHow instruction set. In the wikiHow instruction set, we were tasked with testing us to make sure that my instructions were feasible for people to use. As noted above, I changed my instructions to compensate for the audience. By testing the feasibility of our instructions, I did primary research on what I could change and used these in order to better my instructions. In the two component report, we were responsible for doing both primary and secondary research. For my primary research in the two-component, I conducted a survey about what Wayne State students thought was a major cause against students succeeding in college. On top of that, I did secondary research online. In my two-component report, I wrote, “A team at the Stanford Social Innovation Review worked with Bottom Line, an organization that helps low-income, first generation students get into college and graduate, to diagnose how they could make the organizations college graduate higher. They came across four fundamental characteristics of college success defined under the following pillars: Degree, Employability, Aid, and Life (2).” The information I got from the Stanford Social Review was critical in writing my two-component report as it was a baseline to the solution I proposed. In this