Writing is a skill that is ubiquitously used around the world by people to put their thoughts into words. It is extremely essential in our day to day lives; we spend so much time reading other people’s writings that we do not necessarily stop and think about how and why the writer created a specific piece. Even short writings like a Twitter post or Facebook comment have a purpose and were crafted by a person to either inform, persuade, or state something. As I have strengthened my own writing skills throughout this semester, I have been thinking more critically about my writing: why am I crafting sentences like this, what am I trying to put into the reader’s head, and do my words come across as clearly as they do in my mind?

Taking this course, Writing for Engineering, has helped me to hone in on what truly makes writing good. My history with writing is long and storied, as I grew to love it and then hate it. I have spent so many hours writing work I was not proud of during the past 10 years of my academic career. After taking a break from writing courses for a couple semesters, I was able to come into this class with a fresh perspective. I had always thought of writing as a means to an end but working on the various pieces in this class has altered that perspective. Writing is more than proving a point; it’s about emotionally and intellectually connecting with your reader through the words on a page, it’s about taking the swirling thoughts in your mind and making them clear enough for another person to understand them, and it’s about working together to find your true voice and really pare down your words to mean what you truly want to say.

Throughout this course, I have had to think critically about the purpose of my writings and how I can explain or persuade in a way that makes sense to the audience I am targeting. The push and pull between an author’s knowledge and a reader’s understanding is what separates clear and concise writing from an incomprehensible jumble of words. By utilizing my classmates during peer reviews and brainstorming sessions, I could ensure that the way that I was describing something was understandable and persuading. There have been times that I have said or written things that made sense to me, but a classmate will ask for clarification about. That’s how I knew that I needed to think twice about the language I was using to communicate.

My process for writing work inside and outside of this class is to first spend a while just thinking about how I want to approach the problem. I would make a sort of mental outline and then start to jot down notes on the topic. If any reading was essential to the work, I would read and annotate the piece (or pieces) a couple of times to make sure I fully understood them. After that, I would start to work on a first draft, but only after I already had an idea about the shape my writing would take. This class thankfully allowed us to utilize our peers to review our drafts, which honestly helped to point out some things I would not have noticed by myself. Reading a peer’s work on the same assignment also helped me to gauge where I stood compared to my peers in terms of writing prowess.

Writing pieces like the cover letter and memo helped me to work on my more casual interpersonal writing skills. Techniques that I utilized in those pieces are the kinds of writing I do the most: emails and communications with professors and employers. Writing the technical description piece was very entertaining and, not only challenged me to understand a complicated electronic device but challenged me to also explain that to some that might have less technical knowledge than I do. Working with a group for the proposal was interesting, especially reading the medley of writing styles that the final piece ending up containing and how all our voices shone through and melded to support our goal.  

Overall, this semester has changed the way I feel about writing. I did not love it before and would often dread writing assignments, but now the words fluidly come to me, and I end up feeling much more comfortable with the words that end up on the page. I think that is one of my major takeaways from this course: the more comfortable you are writing, the more your skills and confidence will shine through in your writing.