NEStout Portfolio

 English 2010-028 Intermediate Writing

 Reflection:

            This semester I took math and English to satisfy my engineering major. In English, we focused on identifying a target audience through rhetorical appeal, and genre; both can be implementable in my future career as an engineer. Rhetorical appeal helped me understand how to write persuasively using emotion, credibility, and logic, which helps the writer connect with the reader. Genre writing helped me understand how to present researched material for different levels of experience in a specific topic. In real life, engineers might need to present a report to other engineers, and present much more simplistic ideas to clients that have a limited understanding of engineering terminology.

            English 2010 placed students in a collaborative environment with a great amount of peer-review. Every major assignment was shared with a group of student writers and feedback was given to each writer by each writer. The Green Movement was the group that I chose out of a class selected list. Our group was small, which made peer-review extremely difficult and less rewarding to my peer. However, we made due and moved forward. In the end, we both provided as much feedback to one another as we could. My group mate understood grammar and punctuation; she helped me limit those errors in my assignments. I understood citation and aided her with parenthetical citation. Furthermore, we helped each other decide which genres to write in based on our research we had done throughout the semester.

Peer-review has helped me achieve more than just writing a paper full of babble. I have cemented in memory how to represent a topic to individuals that are unaware of that specific topic. Through peer-review I was able to present clear and presentable assignments. For example, with my position and proposal peer-review I was able to identify confusing points that were unnecessary.  I have noticed that the writer understands and sees the direction they want the paper to go. Therefore, it is challenging to see how the audience will perceive your paper. Ultimately, it is extremely important to converse with the reader through writing; furthermore, it instills great communication skill building.

In English 2010, my last English class in my journey through school required me to draft, revise, revise, and revise. For our final individual project revision was imperative to achieve an adequate grade. I chose to revise my most presentable assignments that still presented plenty of revision. The first assignment was the position and proposal, in the revision I focused on rearranging paragraphs that felt out of place. With revision I attempted to clarify confusing statements and remove any miss-used commas and words.  Much of the revision on the position and proposal was drafting a new call-to-action; however, I still feel that it is weak. The second and third assignments I revised seemed to go together much easier than the position and proposal did.

Finally, when considering which three assignments to include in my final portfolio, I looked at presenting a variety of genres that we covered throughout the semester. I wanted to present three genres that I would most likely us in engineering or at least see regularly. Therefore, I included a brochure on the pollution of the Ganges River in India, my position proposal on the pollution problems that India must change or deal with the consequences, and a review of a documentary on the Ganges River. I attempted to give my audience a variety of genres to read with minimal errors. Moreover, I wanted the reader to see how I progressed through English, conquering each assignment with devoted intentions of passing the class; which helped me to finish the class and move forward toward my ultimate goal, earning my civil engineer degree from the University of Utah.