Olivia Looper

Reflection Essay

ENGL 3140

May 5, 2022

1. At the beginning of this semester, my writing was already at a good level of

effectiveness for the career field that I am going into following graduation. In
my internships I have gained great experience at writing requests for
information, submittals, and subcontracts. Following graduation, I will be
going into Construction Management, and will have many everyday activities
that requires me to effectively write correspondence between multiple
different entities. I do however believe that I have seen a great improvement
in my technical writing abilities regarding memos, instructions, and white
papers. I do believe that there are areas in this course where areas of
improvement could be better addressed. This could be done through more
checkpoints for larger projects, more small miscellaneous writing
assignments, and more time in between large writing assignments. A lot of
my day to day activities at work require writing between coworkers,
subcontractors, and owners in order to receive clarification on what needs to
actually occur on the construction project, so being able to effectively
communicate with people within and outside the project team is a crucial
skill.
2. My goal for this course was to become better at writing for professional
settings and learning how to effectively write correspondence between
members of the project team and people outside of the project team. Based
on my performance this semester, and my experience gained in my
internship on the Clemson Memorial Stadium Renovations project have
proved that I am more than capable now of writing correspondence and
professional documents between me and my project team. I believe that my
success in achieving my goal was mainly due to the many different types of
assignments that we completed this semester. The instructions assignment
allowed me to discuss the step by step information for something that I am
passionate about, which always makes it easier to talk and write effectively
and efficiently. The White Paper Assignment allowed me to complete
 research that I then had to convey to other people, which took me farther
out of my comfort zone and made me more confident to write about topics
that I may not know everything about but need to convey the information
effectively to others.
3. From this course, I am most proud of my engagement project. I loved getting
to work outside of my comfort zone and visit many different places that
corresponded with my chosen topic of interest. I had never worked within
storysphere, so being able to gain experience with a new medium was very
exciting because I always seem to work within the same software systems. If I
could add any assignment to this class, I would add a research presentation
that builds off of our white paper and workplace correspondence
assignments. While this is a technical writing course, I believe that a large
part of technical writing also includes the presentation in meetings and
conferences of important professional material, and it would be really good
practice within this course to be able to have the opportunity to present the
research that we have completed throughout the semester in a professional
setting. If I could edit any assignment in this course, I would probably edit the
topics of the white paper assignments to make them slightly more structured
than being able to choose any book on any environmental feature in a given
book series. I believe that this would have given a little more structure to the
assignment to give us more relatable topics.