Self Assessment

“A home not only serves the utilitarian purpose of providing us with shelter, it is also an expression of who we are. Good art is about inspiration and emotion while good design is about scale and measurements. This is why architecture is often referred to as the intersection where art and science collide”, said the Pritzker Prize winning architect Martha Thorne. This intersection drove me to pursue a career in the field but its certainly a difficult to navigate. The writing for engineering class acted as a stepping stone in understanding this intersection. I have always used writing as a creative means of communication and expression but catering it to fit the technical requirements of engineering was the challenge this course presented.

We began the semester with the Formal Letter of Introduction. This was more creative than technical but its requirements were extremely specific so the struggle was to stay within the context. I think through this exercise my organization skills improved and I learnt to write work that catered to the scope of the audience. I negotiated my own writing goals, like refraining from writing about hobbies and taking an academic oriented approach to match the professors or the audiences expectations. This brief assignment was followed by Memo Writing, this was my first time writing using this genre. This exercise required more technical knowledge and expected us to present technical information in a digestible manner. This exercise allowed me to formulate and accumulate a stance through my writing. I knew I was going to be dealing with the printer problems but I expanded it to the scope of the entire college and came up with an alternative cost effective solution as I documented the facts and figures. Using a table to document the problems and solutions as demonstrated in the class helped me navigate this process. The table made during class and the table I drew out are as follows:

The Memo Writing was followed by a self reflection which allowed me to reread my work and understand my strengths and weaknesses, and ways I must work to produce better work in the later assignments. By re reading the document few days after it was submitted, I was able to analyse it in an objective manner which allowed me to enhance strategies for reading and revising.

The next assignment was the Lab Report Analysis Assignment, we had to compare and analyse three lab reports. I practice using various library sources like onesearch and online databases like JSTOR to find reports that where scholarly/peer-reviewed while relevant to one another. At this point we were dealing with real life technically intense documents, these were tough to understand so breaking them down and comparing them was a herculean task. I tried to achieve this by documenting information without providing a background, assuming that the reader has read the reports and organizing the essay initially using titles. This allowed me to engage in multimodal composing, I composed in a header and paragraph format and converted it to an essay format to engage in effective writing across disciplinary contexts. This assignment was also my first attempt navigating the APA style of writing so through using resources like Owl Purdue I was able to partake in genre analysis.

The Lab Report was guided by a peer review. Through writing a peer review , I was able to understand the flaws in my work and self-assess it in the process. I developed and engaged with my peers to learn how analyses can be organized as an essay and how smooth transitions can be carried out, through discussing connecting words and phrases. My peers advised me to draft my essay in a manner that I only include information that supports my argument. As for editing, the class discussion and exercise, where we were given wordy sentences from random essays that my peers wrote to cut down jargon, helped me avoid wordiness by pushing me to practice it on my own essay. Continuous correspondence, class discussions and constant review helped me acquire these strategies for drafting, editing and self-assessment.

The Lab Report was followed by the Technical Description, as an architecture student I have never taken the time out to read the specifications of trivial everyday items. It was an interesting exercise, we were pushed to present the product in an objective manner but creativity came in the fact that we had to sell the product while presenting facts. It helped me practice udung sources because I had to cite secondary sources and diagrams which I havent done before. I was able to strengthen my source use practives by evaluating the impact of the practices I used and I tried to not only direct quote the information I found but also paraphrase it to communicate certain information more effectively. With the several diagrams and pictures the assignment contained, I learnt how to cite them too. With marketing predominantly driven by social media like Instagram and youtube, and several websites with unverified specifications and testimonials, it was challenging to find reliable sources apart from the companys website. As my product was only sold online, most information pertaining to it were from resources that were not reliable enough to cite, navigating this space helped me sharpen my source use practices. I used a rhetorical situation table as the benchmark to filter sources, if they halped me achieve any of the rhetorical aspects while being reliable I used them.

The final project for this semester was the group proposal where we were tasked with coming up with our own innovation as a group and present it to the class at the end of the semester. This was an interesting exercise, a confluence of artistic thinking and scientific design along with collaboration and compromise. The brainstorming sessions were we documented the various ideas we could work on were particularly interesting and helped us harness the team working skills. The assignment helped us acknowledge our linguistic differences which was tackled using rhetorical sensibilities. Some of us leaned more towards a formal language through use of technical words like ‘kratky system’ while others wanted it to be easier to understand so they wanted to use words like ‘gravity.’ We also had conflicts on where each detail in the text needs to be placed as shown in the screenshots of the chat section:

Some of us wanted to concentrate on aspects like the devices compatibility in the house versus cost comparisons. We had to compromise the former part owing to the word limit. We also developed and engaged in collaborative writing through use of google documents and slides. We divided sections each of us had to write and edited each others works to arrive at the final draft. A similar process was undertaken in the presentation, compromise and conflict pertained more to graphics in this section of the exercise, some of us wanted lesser words and more drawings while others wanted more words that would make the slides self explanatory and in the end we compromised to have both words and diagrams in our slides.

This semester was an interesting exercise of learning to work with technical information in an artistic manner while learning key aspects of writing like rhetorical situations,different styles like APA which is typically used for scientific work, different genres like Lab Reports and Memos along with navigating the realm of finding and using sources . We also developed few key life skills like learning to work in groups and learning to self analyse and edit our work. It helped me understand the architecture of writing for engineering which is made up of carefully analysed technical information from reliable sources packaged in a creative and digestible manner depending on the rhetorical situations it tackles (eg. the audience it caters to or the genre it adopts).