Before coming into the writing for an engineering class, I had been in an English writing class, free writing, and read books. The way that I write is to drop down ideas and write about them in depth; sometimes, when I have to research, I formulate a structure for my assignment and search for information. I rarely use this in my assignments and writing as I see writing as a hassle when someone tells me what to write, but it is enjoyable for free writing. I have never paid attention to my grammar when it comes to writing, as it was not my priority on my list, nor my punctuation, as I believe it to be unnecessary. Things such as rhetorical situation, audience, author, tone, purpose, genre, medium, stance, and language are not in the back of my mind when it comes to writing, even when I am writing this theory for writing as for my portfolio.

When it comes to writing before coming into writing for engineering is that I write the way I want to write, it may conflict with specific assignments such as research papers, documents, and such, but my way of writing tends to blend professionalism, narrative, personal, and descriptive into one. At the end of the course, I reflect on one thing that any writer needs to know when it comes to writing what is your intention? Your or my work has a purpose, a goal that needs to be achieved; I used to write stories, and I noticed that I try to fit everything into my stories to please everyone. I used to believe that everything I wrote needed so many details, including the character’s backgrounds and motives, as I thought that as long as it was interesting, had details, and made sense, my stories and writing would work.

Reviewing my previous reflections on past assignments, I was paying attention to the rhetorical situation, audience, author, tone, purpose, genre, medium, stance, and language; that is what reflections are. However, even though I have never considered them a priority, I was thinking about it. Looking at the technical description of the switch controller, it was my first time writing an assignment about this which made me worried about how to approach this kind of assignment. Utilizing some writing strategies, such as brainstorming, revision, and peer review, made writing the assignment much better, as it let me build this road of how to start and finish the paper. I believe that brainstorming and revision are essential for any kind of writing now; however, peer review is something that I do not consider to be useful in my opinion as in the past and present when I would let my peers and friends see my work in assignments or stories there feedback was not very helpful or useful at all. I would not consider dropping peer-review together, just finding someone willing to look into my work, like a professor/teacher.

Regarding the rest of the writing strategies, such as citation and group work, I have mixed feelings when using these two. Citation is essential, but it is optional depending on you or my work, such as writing stories and films with information behind them. Of course, you would need to cite the author as such, but for information, let’s say, an example, one of the stories has a theory involving physics. I will briefly cite where and who made the theory in the middle of a story or film. Group work, on the other hand, is where many colleagues around the globe, and I can agree that it is a hassle and infuriating thing to do. Depending on the people working with you, they may feel the same; however, during the recent assignment, I learned that it’s not that students working together are simple hard ones who just refuse to do the work. Management is critical when working in group work; in my recent group, we did our best to pull our weight in the assignment and try to meet the deadline. However, there were times, such as the technical description and slides, that we needed to do together, but our times did not align as two students had class during the evening while one did not; our schedules were inconsistent. 

Going forward, I will approach writing differently; instead of dropping down points and writing about them and going in-depth, I will brainstorm, revise, and peer review everything I have written to gain feedback and further enhance my writing skills. Not only that, but also to pay attention to the rhetorical situation, audience, author, tone, purpose, genre, medium, stance, and language. Understanding that it is essential to remember them when writing, it will be difficult to break away from my writing style as I have been doing it for quite a while. Finding time to manage in group work and on my own will also be problematic as things don’t go how we want them. However, learning them and doing them repeatedly to schedule time in group work and my own and revising key strategies in writing and key rhetorical terms.