1.

SLO-1: Project Planning

a. Project planning was perhaps the most fundamental aspect of writing any document

with cohesive substance. I found that on Project 2 where I talked about Tesla and their

factories that I would consistently repeat myself or iterate on the things that I had yet to

speak about. For a document to be worth reading and anyone who’s supposed to read

to gain anything from it, a document must be well laid out like a train of thoughts that

guide the reader.

b. Without a project planning phase I found that it’s harder to write effectively and words

have a hard time flowing out. I also found that sentences tend to end at points that

don’t have a way to follow through to the purpose of the paragraph. This is specifically

difficult on more abstract projects that not only require thought on the content but also

the formatting of the content. I had a lot of difficulty writing my resume because my

understanding is that an engineering resume specifically for jobs within coding must be

very plain and get right to the point. It seems that the industry doesn’t take kindly to the

fluff that makes up most resumes. They don’t care about your aspirations rather your

ability and previously how you’ve proven yourself.

2. SLO-2: Project Analysis

a. Project analysis correlates completely with knowing your reader. The course

predominantly focused on writing to a variety of audiences, but I found that most of the

time we’re writing to one specific individual and generalize for anyone else that cares to

read the information presented. I learned that most people receiving emails don’t care

to read long paragraphs about nothing and short and concise is always preferable.

Theirs also different mediums through which your audience prefers to receive different
 lengths of information. Long emails should be calls, and if possible, shorter emails that

require an immediate response should be some be a text.

b. Knowing your audience is part of successfully getting your point across and very rarely

are we writing towards the comprehension of our reader. Specifically, among the

industrial environment theirs a lot of wasted because very rarely are people expected to

read these documents. This can be seen in that most manuals are dense and not

accessible to a general audience. Terms of service agreements on the internet are a

prime example of this. Within my work I formatted my resume to be instantly digestible

because a lot of companies run filters through a resume before it ever reaches any

physical person’s eyes. The main things were highlighted to sort of get through their

algorithms and get to a human person.

3. SLO-3: Content Development:

a. Typically, there are always going to a standard non spoken way to write an email or a

resume which everyone is expected to follow. These sorts of standards are also variable

to change within any landscape such as different fields have different requirements for

what they look for. Engineering resumes are supposed to never be longer than 1 page

while I imagine a lot of other industries want to know everything about your

background and aspirations. I see this as indicative of how serious an industry takes

itself and how much they must prove themselves.

b. Within making my resume and cover letter I felt the content was lacking in a lot of ways.

It’s rather difficult to be introspective and figure out how to change the content of your

life. We can use very long and technical words to sound smart but at the end of the day

your employer will be better off if you can communicate more effectively rather than

technically. This is the case for most industries where they’re isn’t a strong continuity of
 progress and people must compete as they are because they don’t have evidence to

prove their technical skills.

4. SLO-4: Organizational Design

a. The task of acquiring strong research skills really depend on how well we can google

and ask questions to sources. When I was researching for project 1, I found that

sometimes the information I was looking for was obscured purposefully and that there

was an actual force behind the lack of information. A lot of people tend to want to hide

negligence and that’s really when reading through and discerning facts from opinions

becomes imperative.

b. Tailoring the fruits of your research is perhaps even more important because your

claims must have resources and at least accuracy to the reports you’ve given. It’s often

that we gather the information and can’t organize it in a meaningful way to make an

impact. In project 1 it seems the intent of writing our angry email was to produce some

sort of change but usually we don’t have the ability to organize the evidence to produce

that change. This tends to be the case even for people who are journalists who write an

article for an intended purpose only for it to miss the mark and do nothing or even be

twisted in favor of the opposition.

5. SLO-5: Written Communication

a. Writing effectively has more to do with the style of the author rather than the audience,

although its how the author applies his style to convey effectively to any audience

where it becomes rather artistic. Some people write more elegantly than others and

people seem to respond more to interesting writers rather than the otherwise. This all

must be done within the guidelines of English though and clarity as well as the

broadness of the writing must be taken into consideration.

 b. I tend to write very sloppily through my first draft and only when I manage to go back

and revise do, I get the technical errors out. I also sometimes forget the necessary

formatting that goes with the genre. Writing emails tends to be difficult for me because

it’s very confusing on the level of formality that goes with composing a first email to

someone. Its probably because writing emails have phases where the more emails sent

the less formal the documents become and the easier it becomes to get the critical

information out.

6. SLO-6: Visual Communication

a. Visual Communication is the art of keeping your reader from getting bored. Most of the

time our writing is boring us to even write so how can you expect your reader not to be

bored while reading it. The main task is to get the most amount of information to your

reader in the most effective way. Graphs and charts help condense technical data into

digestible images. Usually that isn’t enough though and rarely does your reader care to

read everything you wrote so the best way to keep their attention is to use signs to

direct their attention to the info that matters most to them. This is proper use of

headings and titles, as well as color and formatting.

b. I tend to get bored writing my projects so usually I spend some time thinking about

what aspects interest me and what do I want my reader to take from the experience.

Project 3 had a lot of this because looking at efficiency is rather boring but there are

aspects of the company, I was writing about which I wanted to bring into attention. I

found them interesting so my reader would hopefully find them just as fascinating.

7. SLO-7: Reviewing and Editing

a. Perhaps my weakest SLO reviewing and editing is commonly done through rereading my

work a couple times and having autocorrect run through and check my grammar. Very
 rarely am I able to do this just from the principles of English. The modern era of

autocorrect allows that luxury for many people but it’s still important to understand the

fundamentals of English to be able to write complex thoughts and manipulate the poetic

aspects of language to craft artful things.

b. Within project 3 I had to start understanding how to craft different ways of praising

Tesla as a company in more and more elegant phrases to appeal to the reader how cool

and innovative the company is. It gets a bit tiresome to continuously say the same thing,

so I like to use the types of sentence structures I see when I read, although sometimes I

have grammatical errors when attempting to implement them. It’s always a good an

idea to double and triple check your work though. This also helps pick up mistakes

which could be specifically bad when writing something like an article or factual piece

where everything must be accurate.

8. SLO-8: Content Management

a. Content management is how well you can see the frame of whatever your writing about

come together. This is predominantly an engineering type of mindset which can sort of

look at the infrastructure of something and understand its place among everything else.

When writing a technical document on the Tesla manufacturing plant I had to

understand the inns and outs of the entire facility and make assumptions about the

secret process the occur in the facility. All of my assumptions came from critical thinking

skills of how a I knew the manufacturing plant was laid out and how well I could assume

that certain things were occurring in a certain way.

b. The idea of content management has a lot to do with the context information is placed

in and that sense of whether this is done successfully is a very hard thing to gauge. How

can you tell whether the reader is receiving the right ideas? Well you must walk through
 your work with the same perspective as the reader. Most people don’t do this very

effectively and therefore also acquiring the skill to read the invisible context of things is

necessary. This is like reading the purpose of the layout of something like the amazon

front page to decipher their ways of successful marketing.

9. SLO-9: Production and Delivery:

a. The main idea to successfully producing and delivering any piece of technical writing is

always to under promise and over deliver. This also has to do with how quickly you can

master modern mediums of information like power point, word, excel. The person who

makes the best power point will probably always get the raise or at least is the last one

to be fired. There must be a certain level of enjoyment associated with all these things

because otherwise you find yourself making awful content that no one is content

absorbing. It could even produce disfavor when taken with a lack of effort.

b. Mastering these forms of information such as the email, technical reports, or a resume

has profound implications for your professional future. What I learned most is that

typically doing technical writing is a dull affair although that is only because we aren’t

putting the actual effort in making something entertaining and well thought out to keep

the reader as well as ourselves engaged. I’d like for the future to be full of engaging

content rather than the common uninspired things I typically make.