Throughout my educational career, I have taken many writing courses.

Each one has

taught me fundamental skills that will help further my communication in the workplace, but I
believe this course enhanced my ability to teach and transfer ideas and concepts in a way that
people unrelated to the field can understand. As a software engineer in the making, I have always
struggled to communicate the core concepts of my major to people who may not be in a different
major. This struggle undoubtedly follows people into the workplace, which is why being able to
communicate with customers and different teams are such a valued trait in most work fields.
Through learning about new concepts related to my Reaktion book and then working to
communicate those ideas to an audience who knows nothing of it, I truly believe that I have
gained knowledge of how to go about sharing new information to a variety of audiences. While it
may not have been talking about coding to noncoders or presenting a project to a company, these
skills apply to a vast number of workplaces, thus allowing me to continue to develop these skills
in my everyday life.
At the beginning of this semester, I aimed to gain a better understanding of technical
communication and be able to create technical documents. I would say that this course enabled
me to find success in these goals. By following along with the instructional videos, then applying
that knowledge to critique whichever form of document we were focusing on, I grew a greater
understanding of what each piece of these documents encapsulates. I then was able to take all
that knowledge and build a technical document on my own, even though it was unrelated to
computer science. I believe that this learning layout was great for this type of content, as it really
gave us the ability to recognize major pieces of each document type and fine-tune our skills for
making them.
After having completed the major assignments for this course, I can easily say that I am
most proud of my Formal Report Packet. Not only was it interesting to write from the
perspective of another company, but I am also proud of the way in which I was able to
communicate newly learned information to the reader. By working to make the content
understandable to the average reader, and presenting the information in a logical progression, I
believe I communicated the information to be best of my ability. If I could add one assignment to
this course, it would be a short assignment related to our concentration that demonstrates our
ability to write a technical document. By having us write in a subject related to our major, we
could effectively gain practice for a scenario that we might face during our careers. However, I
did appreciate the idea behind having us write these documents based on topics from our
Reaktion book, as this helped us focus on the fundamentals of what each of these documents
needs. I just believe that there may also be value to practicing a “real world” situation while still
having our peers and Professor available to help us. Regarding what assignment I would change,
I don’t believe there is any. Each assignment had its own benefits that it offered to us, and I think
without any of the assignments or requirements that we had, we would be missing out on
important writing tools for our future in this industry. This class truly captured the essence of
technical writing, and I am looking forward to applying the skills I learned from it for years to
come.