This page contains a collection of reflections I wrote throughout the semester after completing each major assignment. These reflections allowed me to pause, look back on my writing process, and evaluate what I learned, what challenged me, and how I improved.

Letter of Introduction

I haven’t written a piece like this before in my life. Writing letters isn’t something I usually do, especially a formal one like this. I tried my best to tell a story specifically about my life and goals. Another thing I also tried my hardest on was being formal. For some reason I’m terrible at being formal, it was something that was revealed to me as I was writing this piece but there is always room for improvement. It’s a skill that I have to work on especially for future reference.

Memorandum

I have never written this type of writing before or anything similar to it. I actually never even heard about a memorandum until now. A problem I encountered while working on this assignment was finding different solutions to my issue that were realistic and doable. The way I found my solutions was pretty simple, I just imagined myself owning 50 years old escalators and what I would do to have them running 24/7. What this assignment revealed to me was that I’m slightly more understanding about the inconvenience, delays and the work that goes into repairs. I would rate my Memo on the same level as the samples perhaps slightly better because I had more headings making it easier to jump through certain parts. If I had the chance to do this piece again, I would 100% submit this earlier so that I can study my materials without this piece in my head.

Technical Description

Before I started this assignment, I knew very little about dryers, especially because we don’t have one here in my apartment. I knew about some of the external components but nothing about the inner components. The way I approached researching about dryers was watching YouTube videos. For some parts of the dryer, I watched repair videos because they really broke down the parts. I would do it the same because it made it much easier to understand. Problems I encountered in this piece were with the images part. Finding specific images that point out the parts I was writing about was tough, so I found it easier to label them myself. In-class activities definitely helped especially with the layout and removing irrelevant parts of my writing. I believe i met my expectations, I do feel like I could have written more, it’s something that I will add in my revisions. If I could do this piece over again, I would try to get myself out of this hole earlier. I’ve been very unmotivated recently and its definitely not an excuse, but it’s been tough focusing on other subjects and tests, so I set English aside to try to focus. I will for sure do better in the future and on the up-and-coming lab report assignment.

Lab Report Analysis

I have done some rhetorical analysis work in the past but not on lab reports. I have never written a lab report before so the structure of one was knew to me, now i believe I shouldn’t have a problem writing one in the future. A problem I encountered when writing this piece was actually understanding the lab reports, many of them use large scientific words that made it hard to easily read through. Honestly, I just either looked up the words or i skipped past them since I was mainly analyzing the structure. Looking for a lab report was tough because I had no clue what topic to pick. After I decided on a topic, navigating the database was no problem. I definitely did research like the librarian instructed in order to find similar reports of the same topic. Identifying the rhetorical situations in the lab reports was pretty easy because they all included headings. However, compared to the textbook, one of the lab reports had their results and discussion together which made it difficult to easily locate both sections. If I had the chance to do this piece over again, I would definitely go through the lab reports earlier because I would say that’s what was most time consuming.

Proposal

To produce this piece i first conducted research in order to get background information and a better understand of the topic in order to write my part which was the intro. I believe I worked in similar fashion to my group mates because we all made our own drafts before adding our sections to the group document. My standards of this piece involved accuracy and thoroughness in order to touch on all the parts of the rubric for my section. I believe i met these standards and my group mates did too. I would give our proposal an 80 because we didn’t do a literature review and there are sections that could be better. A goal I would set for myself next time is to somehow get the group to conversate more to avoid confusion.