Writing For enginnering

Theory of Writing and Digital Portfolio

It is not about the size of the boat, rather the motion of the ocean” – Randy Paguay. As an incoming first-year student, it’s hard to gauge what I expected from the college experience, let alone a class. Teachers always give you that long story in high school, saying you have to be on top of everything, the workload is so much heavier, and stuff like that. So, coming in, I expected to hit the floor running; I was expecting a pile of workload. But to my surprise, it wasn’t like that; my fall schedule classes weren’t too bad as an incoming first-year student: precalc, Literary Studies, intro to Anthropology, philosophy, and Writing for Engineering. Of my five classes, I dreaded going into Literary Studies; I was never a huge fan of English. I dreaded reading and writing about books in general. I saw no point in talking about the importance of why a character did one thing over another or why color impacted the story’s meaning. Every other class was smooth sailing. I enjoyed attending classes because they were simple enough to understand and engaging.

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Going into Writing for Engineering, I expected to be like an English class in high school. Do a detailed analysis of research papers, research on your own, write a paper on a related engineering topic, and so on. When it comes to reading and writing, you can quickly tell the difference in my level of engagement based on the quality of my work. If it is a topic I enjoy, I can read and write documents passionately, detailing essential elements in documents in my writing. I enjoy engineering and learning how and why things work the way they do, which comes naturally to me. Growing up, I didn’t even fathom the idea of working on planes, but because of high school, I found something I’m good at.

My first chance to write a college paper was about a technical description in this class, writing for engineering. The goal was to explain the inner workings of a machine of your choice; I went with a TurboFan. I didn’t do much research, as my background in aviation helped me write this paper. Writing this paper was pretty straightforward. I followed the guidelines and did my best to present the information accurately and enthusiastically. I felt it was appropriate to talk about the historical background of aviation while including details like who created the first jet engine and what aviation was like in the early days. After that, I treated it the way I first learned the information: by breaking up the engine into sections and going into detail while making analogies to common things people already know. I found this way better because I could compare it to something we’re all familiar with, and I thought if I learned it through analogy, why can’t someone else? I tried to be as descriptive as possible so there were no gaps between the information while keeping it as coherent as possible. Unlike English essays, I felt this was fun because I was actively engaged and putting effort into it.

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The informational report was a rinse-and-repeat cycle, except I had to do more research on my chosen topic. This time, the objective was to research how to help mitigate the effects of climate change. Writing about solar panels was a change that I enjoyed, not because it was simple but because I found a format I could follow. Despite it being my second paper, I felt I could Consistently write about reports on innovations that could help the fight against climate change. This time, it was much simpler; I didn’t stress over the assignment and just wrote as if it came naturally. When writing the reflection this time, I felt a little stuck because I didn’t want to repeat the same information as the previous one. Some course objectives mentioned in this reflection were “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond and formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing.” The first-course objective was simple to web into my writing; I didn’t mind adding a few images in places that could use a visual representation; this is a common theme throughout my writing. Visualization helps convey ideas better; it helps break down hard-to-understand information. The second-course objective came naturally as I developed my papers; I delivered a strong, coherent stance on why I believed solar panels were the way of the future for NYC.

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Working with a group makes it difficult to work collaboratively, as we all have creative differences. Sometimes, themes, colors, and fonts clash, and we need a consensus to avoid our topic from looking like a mess. Projects like the PSA, Technical Innovation, and Technical Innovation Video were all assignments that required group work. I would’ve loved for the groups to mixed around for different assignments to have a chance to work with others, but I didn’t mind. I learned to work collaboratively with others to assemble a Canva presentation; I had never worked on Canva before, and this was an excellent introduction. As an incoming freshman, I didn’t expect to touch databases anytime soon. I was scared going forward because of how complicated it looked, luckily the Professor took some time and thought those of us who didn’t know how to access and navigate the databases. It was a fun experience to mess around with new things.

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Throughout my writing process in this class, I learned it is imperative to read over your work. Points were deducted because of simple grammar and spelling mistakes. Proofreading is an effective way to ensure nothing in your essay is overlooked; that’s what I will do moving forward. Working on papers like these helped remove that internal stigma of writting essays is a daunting task, I enjoyed writting about the topics I discussed.

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