Reflection Essay

Writing Development
At the beginning of the semester I had very little exposure to technical writing, only
having read it in instruction manuals and cooking recipes. Throughout the semester I feel that
technical writing skills have greatly improved and I now feel far more confident in my ability to
write in a clear and professional manner. This improvement is thanks to the many different types
of assignments that I completed throughout the semester that served to develop my technical
writing skills in different areas of the field. The memo assignment assisted me most in learning
how to construct a useful tutorial and how to display the results of a usability test in a memo
format. The whitepaper assignment polished my skills on technical writing in a long format and
the correspondence helped to develop those same skills in a much shorter format. My favorite
assignment was the visualization packet where we were asked to go out and take 360 images
of the world around us and relate it back to our chosen course topic. This assignment combined
relevant course material and cutting edge technology in order to create a fun and beneficial
learning experience for me.

Course Goals
My goal for this course was to make an A in the course at the end of the semester while
also learning more about the ways that I could use technical writing in the workplace. Improving
my technical writing skills was important to be because as a software engineer I often write doc
string that explains what the code that I wrote is meant to do and how it functions. This doc
string helps other engineers more easily understand and maintain the code that I have written. I
did meet my goals for the course, I currently have a 96 overall grade and feel much more
confident in the ways that I use my technical writing skills in the workplace. I achieved this
through completing the projects that I was assigned in class thoughtfully and with purpose.

Assignments
Throughout the course of the semester I completed four main assignments; the memo
packet, the whitepaper packet, the visualization packet, and the correspondence packet. Out of
these the assignment that I am most proud of is my final whitepaper document. I feel that the
document is very well put together visually and that The PREP solution is one that could
possibly be implemented in real life. As many of the students taking this course are computer
science majors, I think that it would be helpful to have a doc string packet that would cover how
to properly document code and possibly coding naming standards. If I could edit any
assignments in this course I would change the topics that they are each on. I found that having
the same topic ‘Tsunami’ over the entire semester became tiring to write about during my last
assignment. It would make the course more enjoyable for me I could have chosen a different
topic from the list of topics for each assignment.