Leji Li

Professor Maria Vint

ENGL 21007
December 19, 2019
Final Reflection

New concept and skills

From the semester-long study on writing for engineering, I explored many different kind s

of writing that I never know before, but I am required to learn how to write the decent paper as a

student in engineering school. Memo, response letter, extended definition, description of a

process, instructions and proposal are the topics that I didn’t work on before I take this class. I

used to read the extended definition, description of a process and instructions, but I hadn’t

written any of them by myself. For the lab report, at the beginning I thought that I know how to

write a lab report, because I used to write some lab reports for physics I and II. But when I really

worked on the lab report I found that it has something different comparing with the reports I had

finished. This lab report has an introduction session, while for the physics lab report, method

session is right after the abstract. The presentation is the topic that I feel most comfortable with,

because I took the public speaking class and I did a lot of practices. Also, I am familiar with my

topic, which gives me the confidence to deliver a good presentation.

Strengths

When it comes to the process of constructing my lab report, I thought I did a good job on

writing the introduction and result. For the introduction part, I followed the checklist provided by

the professor, which suggests me build up the instruction part using the sequence of background,

general issue, narrowed issue, the importance of the issue, other’s approach to solve this

problem, the disadvantage of other’s approach and providing the brief result from the data. I

started with the Background of my topic – the CUNY online services, and their importance to the
CUNY students – we CUNY students need to register classes and do homework on them. After

introducing the background, I throwed out the general issue – CUNY online services are hard to

use, then narrow down – they have a terrible experience on phone. Following is other’s

approach; I found the CUNY has several apps and other CUNY schools like LaGuardia

Community College also pushed their own app that can visit CUNY online services. The

disadvantage of those apps is that they can do nothing but displaying the information, and due to

the permission, those apps actually can only access to a limited amount of data. This is my

response to the “disadvantage of other’s approach”. I spent three paragraphs on demonstrating

my solution roughly: building the app’s interfaces, getting information from the servers and

finally feeding the interfaces with that information.

The result part is to analysis the data I collected from the survey. I am not an expert in

data analyzing but I had a good time in playing with my data. With the filter function on the

google sheet, I can learn how the students who use those online services majorly on browser

response on the rate of satisfaction of the experience of difference service as well as the

feedback. The interesting result I found is that the students majorly visit the services on browser

are not likely enjoying visiting those services on phone because they found that the phone is too

small to display the pages. For those who visit the services via phone a lot also giving negative

feedbacks base on their experience on phone operation.

Also, I adapted to the APA format quickly. Before I took this course, I usually used the

MLA format. The MLA and APA have a similar format. For the author, both of those two

formats place the author’s last name in front of the first name, but the different thing is that APA

keeps the initial character of the first name while the MLA requires the whole first name. This
pattern can apply for the rest parts, which is I can find the similar components from the MLA

format on the APA but with a minor difference.

Weakness

I had a hard time on designing the survey and doing research. At the beginning when I

started designing the survey to collect the date for the lab report, I didn’t have a clear idea that

what kind of the data I need to support my argument. My irresolution let me design a pretty

unthoughtful survey so that the data I collected limited my analysis.

Revisions

For the revision part, the most common mistake I made is writing confusing sentences.

Because I am not a native speaker, so my mother language is still in charge of my writing

process. I build a sentence in Chinese and then “translate” it to English later on. So that many of

my sentences will have improper phasing and even do not making any sense at all. When I work

on rewriting those sentences, I break them down to small pieces which is short enough for me to

avoid unclear expression.

Applicability of skills

Instead of applying the skill to write paper for other subjects, the critical reading I got

from this class helps me a lot. Critical reading let me read the materials with my brain, instead of

accepting whatever a professor feed me. When I don’t get what the professor said, I will review

the textbook first. If I can get the answer from the textbook, I will write down my understanding

then ask the professor. If I cannot get it, I write down what confuses me and bring them to my

professor. This makes me more familiar with the context so that I can the professor can explain

the specific question I didn’t get.