Landon Gumphrey

ENGL 3140
Kailan Sindelar
4/30/21
Reflection Essay
Most of my experience in English classes and writing in general has been for research papers or
other types of analysis for reading. My previous classes never really focused on my skills as a technical
writer just writing in general and did not go into specifics like the different projects we did in this class. I
think taking Technical Writing helped develop my writing skills as well as the different technical
documentation common in the real world. The things the documentation and prep documents focus on
like audience, problems/solution, and formatting I never really looked at in detail before. This class
definitely helped me develop my thought process in papers and structure my documents in an
intelligent way. Having the standard structure of each of the projects laid out in each of the power
points gave a format to go by and helped look more aesthetically pleasing. I now know that white space
and formatting plays an important role in writing whereas before I would just go on typing randomly
without a topic or structure in mind.
At the start of this class, I sought out to improve my writing and communication skills as a
whole. Ideally, I wanted to clearly convey my ideas through my writing without confusion. This course
gave me lots of opportunities to gradually gain experience and start to get better with expressing my
ideas in a clean and concise manor. For the most part I think I have improved my skills being in this class.
Overall, I think the introduction of the class with the traditional English class setup and then switching to
the technical document work was a good setup for learning and then putting the theory into practice.
I would say the assignment I am most proud of would be the Instructions and Usability packet. I
am not proud of this because of my initial drafts but of the changes I made throughout. Initially I tackled
the project and packet lots of information into it. After doing some edits formatting more closely to the
documents provided in the power points and clarifying some things from peer review, the document
had a lot of unnecessary information. From this I revamped the document as a whole making some
format tweaks like fonts and color as well as omitting the information. Initially I had very generalized
topic steps in the instructions followed by sections of information and sub steps that were related. From
these I changed the specific steps themselves to be more descriptive and include the general idea of the
full section. Doing this let me delete most of the vast amounts of extra descriptions and steps. If I could
add an assignment to the course, I would choose to add a resume document. Since all of us will
eventually be looking for some type of job it would be good to experience and create a resume that
could then be used in the future. For the other assignments, I cannot think of any edits content wise. I
think they did a good job for the purpose of this class.