Ishvar Sitaldin
Professor Weyn
ENGL 21007
May 22, 2023
Reflection on Writing for Engineers
This essay will include reflections on all of the assignments we received in our ENGL 21007, Writing for Engineering class. It will also show the things we needed to do for these assignments, and what I learned throughout the semester.
The first assignment we received was about describing an egg. We were required to write an essay of 250-300 words, in which we were supposed to give a description of the egg. The route I went with was to describe the egg in steps. I first chose to describe the appearance of an egg and afterwards I also mentioned the structure and buildup of the egg. The main idea about this essay was to teach us about the general form of an essay and also how to correctly cite sources either within the text or on a reference page. At first, I didn’t think that this would be a difficult essay to write, as there is so much to say about the egg, but I quickly realized how difficult it would be to try and pack as much information about the egg in one essay. This assignment taught me to narrow down my area of research, and thus make it easier for myself to write the essay. In the end I narrowed down my topic to chicken eggs and was successfully able to write the essay and to my knowledge I mentioned the most important aspects of the chicken egg.
The second assignment we received was a summary and response essay based on an excerpt of a book called Distant Waves, written by Professor Weyn herself. During this assignment we learned about summary and response essays, and what these types of essays consist of. In general, a summary and response essay is similar to a general essay, in the sense that it consists of an introduction, body and conclusion paragraphs. The difference with a ‘normal’ essay is that the body paragraphs consist of a short summary of the text in question, and a response to this text. For me the most difficult part of this assignment was the response portion of the essay, as I had to come up with a question/topic I would have to respond to. Through this assignment I learned how to find the most important parts of a piece of text, and how to construct response paragraphs to a specific part of the text. This assignment also helped build on the foundations we learned about essays during the first assignment.
For the third assignment we were supposed to make an informational essay about a topic which appeared in a handout about the Brooklyn Bridge. The topic which I chose to write about was caissons. This assignment was similar to the first assignment about the egg, in the sense that we had to research a specific topic and write an essay about it. And because it was so similar, we further developed our understanding of buildup of an essay. We also learned about the difference between an informational essay and a summary and response essay. Unlike a response essay, in an informational essay you are not allowed to voice your opinions about the topic. Everything you write about must be verifiable through sources. We also learned about the different ways of mentioning your sources in an essay. The first one we learned about was in-text citation, and another way of mentioning sources was through a reference page at the end of your essay. The reference page includes all the sources you used to write your essay, and everything is listed in alphabetical order. The trickiest part of writing a reference page is that there are different styles to choose from. The style we talked about during class was ‘APA style citation’. When using this style, you need to include a reference page as well as an in-text citation. On the reference page your sources must include:
- The name of the author
- The date of publication
Optional inclusions are the page number of your information (if it was from a book) and the link to the website (if your source is hosted online). When all was said and done this was my favorite assignment of this class, as researching about new topics is something which I really enjoyed doing.
Our fourth assignment was to write a persuasive email, in which we had to try and convince a billionaire to fund our dream project. During this assignment we learned about how to write a professional essay and what we could include in order to capture the attention of our imaginary billionaire. When writing a persuasive email we learned to first introduce ourselves, and then to concisely describe your project. The goal of this was to not make your email too long as that might discourage people from reading all or part of it. We also learned that we must end our email with a ‘call to action’, this is usually a sentence or two which you write in order to ensure, or at least try and increase your chances, of receiving a response to your email. The final thing we learned about writing persuasive emails was about the different types of endings you can have. We learned about the difference between formal and informal endings. This assignment taught me a lot about writing emails and will most certainly be useful to me in my life going forward.
The fifth assignment we received for this class was to write a lab report. The topic of this lab report was about an experiment which you conducted for your dream project. We were required to come up with a type of experiment and write a lab report which needed to include the following headings: Title, Introduction, Procedure, Results, and Discussion/Conclusion. The report also needed to include a minimum of 1 graph or chart. We received handouts during class which explained to us in detail about writing a lab report. For me personally, this was one of the easiest assignments as I already had some experience writing lab reports. Nonetheless, this was a great assignment to refresh my memory about the basics of writing a lab report.
Our last assignment, assignment 6, was to write an essay about different ways to save the city of Venice against the rising sea levels and the sinking of the city. This was for me one of the most challenging assignments, as we had a minimum number of words we needed to reach in our essay. This is something we had for all of the other assignments, but in this case we had to come up with the topic all by ourselves. There wasn’t much to research, as we had received a handout during class which was an article from The New York Times, about the situation in Venice. The essay had to include a short summary of this handout, and needed to include a solution to the problem Venice is facing. Writing the summary was not difficult as we had done something similar for our second assignment, the tough part of this essay was to come up with solutions and write and explain them as clearly as possible. In the end I managed to complete the essay, but I had to come up wit 3 solutions instead of just 1 in order to reach our word target. This assignment was definitely the most challenging, but I definitely learned a lot.
To summarize, this class required us to complete six assignments all of which counted toward our final grade. Each assignment taught us something new about writing, be it for essays, reports or emails. All of these definitely seem to be very useful for engineering students such as me and I will be taking all of this new information with me for my future works.
