May 8, 2019

Self-Assessment Essay

My name is Petr Lelikov, I am a freshman at The City College of New York and I am currently majoring in Electrical Engineering. I never really liked writing but this Writing for Engineering class evolved my perceptions on what writing is, which made writing enjoyable. By the end of the class, there are certain learning objectives that should have been achieved or improved. Some of these objectives are:

• enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, and editing
• practice using various library sources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources of appropriate to your writing projects
• acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
• strengthen your source use practices

Each individual has their own views on what writing is. For some it is a way for them to escape reality, for others it is a way to relax or evaluate what happened in their day. But for me, writing is a mode of self-expression and a way to spread information. In writing, one can express their side and provide evidence to why they think that way. Then, their view can be shared with others even when the author is not there. This semester my perceptions on what writing is have evolved because I learned that writing could be a great form of teaching oneself as well. For the assignments in which we had to do research, such as technical description and the engineering proposal, we had to transfer the research that we did into our writing. My technical description was about fuel rods in a CANDU reactor and there I had to learn what was the purpose of these fuel rods and how they were different in a CANDU reactor. But I had to learn about it very thoroughly so I could explain it in my own words in my writing. Just reading about the fuel rods would have mostly had me memorising what was written in the text, but writing about it made me go one step further to learn its concepts so I could implement that information in the simplest way possible in my writing. “Nuclear fission is the process of splitting apart large nuclei, which in this case is uranium-235. This can be achieved by launching a thermal neutron into an unstable nucleus”. In this quote I explain what nuclear fission is in my simplest terms. When I reading about nuclear fission at first, I was confused about the process but after writing it while trying to put it in simple terms, I gained a much better understanding of what nuclear fission is and its process. This is because memorizing the concept is one thing but trying to teach it to my audience through my writing requires me to understand the concept.

One of the course learning outcomes that I have improved in is enhancing my strategies for drafting. During this semester, I began to create outlines of my assignments in which I state in bullet points, the information I want to include in each paragraph. This allows me to add on any ideas that come later on, and it allows me to see which information I could remove.

Introduction

• Hook
• State the problem
  • Long commute time
  • Air pollution/Global warming (PROVIDE STATISTICS)
  • Noise pollution
  • Removes human error/Driver
• Provide opportunity/Innovation

Discussion of comparable  innovations

• High expense of hyperloop
• Talk about dangers of low pressure tube
• Weak foundation in Dubai (groundwater)/Low bearing capacity of the soil
• Talk about the air pressured hyperloop (Original)

Here is a part of an outline that was done for the engineering proposal. This allowed me to see what information could be included in the first draft. By following the bullet points, I did not miss any information that I wanted to add. It also helped me to see which information is out of place. In this outline I saw that the bullet point “Weak foundation in Dubai” was out of place because we were discussing hyperloops and weren’t focusing on a specific location.

Assignments such as technical description and engineering proposal helped me with improving my sense for the audience that I am writing for. In my technical description, I used a lot of vocabulary and wrote concepts that I thought were simple but it created confusion to my audience. “The way this works is a fast neutron with energy higher than 1 megaelectronvolt is launched at uranium-238 isotope, and this creates uranium-239 isotope”. In this sentence I am trying to explain how uranium becomes a different element. A lot of unnecessary vocabulary is being used here that can create a lot of confusion to people who don’t know about this subject. For the engineering proposal, I tried to use as less vocabulary as possible and have the concepts very straight forward, and this really helped my audience to understand what I am writing about. “The train would be more weather resistant because it does not touch the train tracks, so the snow and the ice would not affect the train’s performance”. Here I just stated that the train does not touch the tracks, instead of explaining the electromagnetic suspension with how and why these electromagnetic fields are not affected by the weather.

Throughout the semester, I’ve improved using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate my writing. The sources that I used for my technical description were mostly from few different sites that were found on the internet. In the engineering proposal, the amount and the variety of sources increased. I even went as far as requesting research from a professor for my engineering proposal. While researching for some economic factors of the maglev trains, I came across a locked article on the “Economics and Politics of the high speed rail” by Germa Bel. Since in our proposal we were going to lay tracks across the United States, I thought that a lot of useful information could be found in his research.

Overall, Writing for Engineering class helped me with writing organized and thorough lab reports by teaching me about the correct format or a structure of the lab. The class also taught me how to present information clearly to an audience through my writing as well as oral presentation. It provided me with information that I will utilize in order to reach professional levels of writing and presentation that I will need to have in the future.