Before starting my first writing assignment in this course, I had the pros and cons of my writing abilities. One of the cons was not being as detailed as I could be. During the first major writing assignment, which was the lab report, I struggled. I never wrote a lab report with such a different POV, trying to be detailed but observant. I can tell throughout my Lab Report rough draft, just how many mistakes were being made in the sense that it didn’t meet the requirements of what a lab report is and how it should be written. After receiving edits on my rough draft and then revising it for my final, I realized that this course was going to help improve many aspects of my writing.

            One of the course learning outcomes of this course was “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment” which I have reached while coming towards the end of the course. First and foremost, I had rough drafts for all my major assignments, the lab report, technical description, engineering proposal. Through these rough drafts, I had to learn how to revise and edit my rough drafts based on my own as well as peer review comments. For instance, in my lab report, my tone throughout my writing as well as the language I used was very opinionated, which was something I was used to doing. With a lab report, you should be using a passive voice, there shouldn’t be any words of emotions like how I incorporated “shocking”. After revising my report, I learned to change all these little words I used here and there to make my piece more passive. With the technical description rough draft, I had few edits to make, one being yet again, nothing opinionated like saying “Apple is the best” or anything like that. In the technical description, you are describing piece by piece what an object is made of and what it does. My object was Apple Airpods, which while describing, I needed to be more descriptive and more describing what each component does. While writing this piece, I saw how my writing immensely improved from doing the lab report to writing this piece. I had a huge problem with being too opinionated on writing pieces that shouldn’t have opinions in them. During this course, I learned just how bad this problem was through revising and editing, and it truly helped me realize that I need to know what tone I’m using, voice I’m writing with the next time I write a lab report for instance or just a regular writing assignment.

            Another huge course learning outcomes in this course was “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes”. I was always very independent with my writing; I never really did a collaborative writing piece or did discussion posts in my writing career so having to do these types of writing was new and scary for me. When I had to do a podcast reflection, which was to listen to a podcast and write down my afterthoughts, answer the questions given. However, I did not know this was a discussion post and having other people see my writing was nerve racking especially when I started getting replies. However, after posting it , I saw how helpful this could be in not only seeing what others say to you, what they think but also seeing how they think similarly to me. Seeing the replies to my other discussion post about the squirrel bird feeder made me realize just how similar people thought about different methods just like me. However, you could still see the difference in everyone, even a tiny aspect of their thinking.

            Alongside discussion posts came another collaborative writing piece, one of the major ones, engineering proposal. This assignment was a group assignment, which never turned out well for me because working in groups for a project can be so frustrating with such unorganized people or people who don’t do their work, so I was not ready for this. However, after meeting with my group and getting so comfortable with them to be able to share thoughts on our writing piece, give out suggestions or edits to our proposal, I saw just how important collaboration can be. For instance, while writing the final draft of the engineering proposal, my group including me would help each other out on what edits to make, anything more to add. Especially for a big chunk of our piece, we needed to be very detailed and when working with others on how to be more thorough or descriptive, I gained more insight from other POV which can be a huge mind opener on something I may never have thought of. By the end of the course, I got more okay with doing anything collaborative as I saw how it could be something beneficial for my writing and for other’s writing as well.

            Another course learning outcome was “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects” During any English class, you are always going to be using many resources like the internet or a magazine for any information or references for writing pieces. During all my writing pieces throughout this course, I needed to use the internet to get all my sources for any information throughout. For instance, my lab report, I needed to go on YouTube and use a video from there to write a lab report on. My technical description , I used the official apple website to get my information on airpods, I used other google images to reference visuals for my writing. My engineering proposal used heavy amounts of references and sources to gain information on different mines, hazards throughout mines, specific statistics used for the budget portion. All throughout the course, including any discussion post, used online sources to help me reference more information for my writing piece to be detailed, informative.

            Throughout the course, I’ve learned different techniques, different ways of writing better, improving on my writing skills that I had already. Even though I am not perfect at writing, as is no one, I have definitely improved on my negative aspects of my writing, knowing how to use tone and language better, how to collaborate with people, how to revise more thoroughly, etc.