Rhetorical Analysis Reflection

My rhetorical analysis of three lab reports was written for the purpose of understanding the format and the rhetorical strategies that create a well-written lab report. The genre of this essay was a rhetorical formal essay, where I tried to convince the audience of something with compelling arguments and evidence. The motivation behind this assignment was to more deeply understand how to write a good lab report, as writing lab reports is an important part of the engineering field. The audience was my fellow classmates as well as Professor von Uhl. I used an academic tone to convey my message rationally and without bias. I delved into each lab report by dissecting each piece that compromises a lab report: the introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. This helped me to find specific similarities and differences in each part of the report. The context of this piece involves myself being an engineering student, which allows me to interact with other engineering students to support each other’s learning experience, as well as the fact that writing lab reports will be an important part of my education and probably my career.

Constructing this essay did help accomplish some of the course-learning outcomes. The peer reviews helped enhance my revising and editing strategies and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing. It also helped to strengthen my source use practice as I used a lot of paraphrasing, synthesizing, and analyzing in my paper. It was difficult to grapple with some of the language and jargon found throughout these lab reports, but it ultimately helped to strengthen my own comprehension and analysis skills. Writing the initial draft and then receiving feedback from my classmate helped me to narrow down and condense my argument into what I really wanted to say. I also became thoroughly familiar with utilizing online databases to find information on a specific topic. Overall, the assignment helped to deepen my understanding of rhetorical writing and accomplish some of the course-learning objectives.

Technical Description Reflection

The technical description of a Super Nintendo Controller I wrote was created for the purpose of understanding how to create a formal technical description as well as understanding how to properly cite images in APA format. The genre of this paper was a technical description of an object, comprised of descriptions of every aspect of the object as well as the history and relevance of that object. The motivation behind this assignment was to comprise a typical everyday item and how to describe each component of that item to an audience that may not know how the object works. The audience for this paper is Professor von Uhl as well as my classmates. The tone used is one that is formal but still easy to read. Breaking down the Super Nintendo controller helped me to practice explaining something that is not immediately apparent to a viewer. Writing this paper also challenged me to understand how each piece of the product worked in conjunction to make the item function, and how I can explain that to an audience who might not have as much technical knowledge as me.

Completing the technical breakdown assignment helped to accomplish some of the course-learning outcomes. Utilizing peer reviews helped to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment, as well as helping to acknowledge the range of linguistic differences between my classmates and myself. Developing our skills in a collaborative environment helped us to engage with the social aspects of writing in addition to further enhancing our writing skills by seeing what works and what doesn’t. Writing a technical description also engaged multimodal composing techniques by placing images directly in the paper and referencing them throughout. This assignment definitely helped to strengthen specific writing skills and effectively accomplished some of the course-learning outcomes.

Proposal Reflection

The assignment that I am reflecting on today is the group project that involved creating a proposal as well as presenting it. The genre of this piece was a formal proposal that was created with the intent to persuade the reader into becoming interested in the project and possibly even investing in it. The audience for the proposal was Professor von Uhl, the class Writing for Engineering section D3, as well as potentially the MTA. The motivation behind this proposal was to respond to the recent news of people being pushed onto the subway tracks and to try to engineer a solution to the problem. The purpose of this proposal was to work together in a group and come up with a coherent and persuasive paper and presentation. The tone used was a formal one that displayed a thorough sense of understanding of the issue and the solution. Creating this proposal gave me and my team a chance to work amongst each other to create something we all agreed on and believed in.

 This proposal helped to accomplish many of the course-learning outcomes. Just about every course-learning outcome was relevant to this project. We had to communicate amongst ourselves to understand our range of linguistic differences, and then we were able to utilize our strengths where they would be most applicable. We engaged heavily in the social aspects of writing including writing together, editing each other’s work, and giving feedback when appropriate. Our writing spanned many genres and formats, from press releases to technical descriptions, we had to use different tones for different aspects of the proposal. Giving the presentation allowed us to utilize a presentation which required a different style of writing than a traditional paper. We had to work together to come up with a stance and then used writing techniques to persuade the reader to believe in our stance. We had to research statistics to support our claims as well as find images to give visuals during our presentation (that we APA cited of course). Overall, this project helped us to work on a myriad of writing techniques and style and helped us to accomplish the goals of this course.