Considering the audience

As an engineer, the majority of my writing highly technical. If I had applied the same Discourse Community Analysis to my and my classmates' writing, the conclusion would have been that the writing is highly specialized communication between peers. I had never really considered my audience when writing lab notebooks or lab reports, as my audience (largely professors, classmates and colleagues) have a similar knowledge base.

For the Public Writing piece, I took a topic I knew a lot about (from my coops and researched writing piece) and adapted it for a non-technical audience. It's really important for scientists and engineers to be able to communicate their work with other people - it's how we get funding, sell products and solve problems. I really learned a lot about how to communicate and make technical information more accessible to the general public through this assignment. It's not always easy and I now understand why science writers are so important!

Revising and editing: from unfinished mess to polished success

In this course, the revision and editing process was vital to my success. In the case of my Researched Writing piece, my first draft was not my best work. I'd spent a lot of time researching and finding valuable sources, from which to construct my argument. This left me very little time for outlining and writing, and the resulting work was poorly organized and incomplete.

My second draft was much more complete. Additionally, the peer editing process, where I exchanged papers with a classmate, helped me organize my thoughts in a more logical order. With the second round of peer editing, we were instructed to look at the strength of our classmate's argument. Perhaps a lingering effect of all the technical writing I do, my first two drafts were simply a presentation of the research I'd done. For my final draft, I looked at how I was presenting the facts and tried to analyze and show how they supported my thesis. I believe this was the key to a strong argument and the success of this assignment.

Pre-writing: organizing for success

I've always preferred writing an outline before I begin drafting an essay. Outlines help me structure my writing, ensuring my thoughts are presented logically and support my thesis. Investing time up front makes the process of actually writing much faster, as everything is already organized. The times that I haven't written an outline, I've spent a lot of time trying to simultaneously organize my writing and write reasoned and meaninguful sentences, ultimately not performing either to the best of my ability. By writing an outline before I begin writing, I have been able to think about the order and flow, often streamling the revision and editing process.

For this course, one of our assignments was a worksheet for the Discourse Community Analysis. While not as structured as an outline, this worksheet gave me the opportunity to analyze the discourse community I'd chosen and then organize these thougths into an essay. Here are the worksheet and the final draft of the reslulting essay.

Who am I (as a writer)?

As the semester draws to a close, I will be reflecting on my body of work and what that says about me as a writer. I want to explore my process, examine my strengths and weaknesses, and measure my progress with the course goals.

I started this course a little bit cocky, believing my writing chops to be above average, for an engineer. The genres explored in this course forced me to step out of my rhetorical comfort zone. Technical writing has been the cornerstone of my university writing experience. Dry and often rigid (I've had a professor who banned the use of the phrase "due to"), the purpose of this genre has been to communicate learning as clearly and concisely as possible.

This course has enabled me to focus more on the process, rather than the content, of my writing. By exploring different genres and styles, I've adapted my writing to different audiences, developed arguments and established a reviewing/editing process to refine my writing. Through this blog, I will explore and reflect on this process.