Opportunity to assess my writing process from a more technical approach.
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Yosef Zidell
Professor Rodwell
Writing for engineers
October 13, 2019
Self- Reflection Essay
It’s fair to note that there was a major advantage I had going into this analysis essay. First, it was helpful already having done a self-reflection essay on my Memo essay, allowing me to gain a clearer perspective while writing my report this time around. For example, I felt extremely confident in the structure of my essay, something I did not have while writing my memo. While writing my memo, I constantly found myself going off on tangents, not focusing on the points of that section. If I needed to strictly stress the problem I was addressing, I shouldn’t be mentioning its effect, and vise versa. My lack of structure, sticking to the necessary points of my essay, made my memo seem sloppy to say the least. During my lab report analysis, I felt I was able to give a solid structure to each section, as my plan of analysis was under strict guidelines given by the Technical Communications textbook. Having a backbone to lean on for my writing structure was extremely helpful for me, and really eliminated an apparent writing weakness of mine.
Going into my analyzation, I needed a proper plan in order to assess the various reports I was dealing with. Thankfully, my professor was kind enough to suggest choosing reports that had similar topics, which created a much clearer platform to compare them. Before I was able to write my essay, I needed to go through each report individually and assess its strengths and weaknesses, by the standards I chose to use from the Technical Communications textbook. I chose to analyze each report entirely before moving onto the next, instead of analyzing each section of the reports together. I did this for a couple reasons: First off, I felt that reading the entire report entirely made my opinions in each section more sustainable, as I didn’t need to worry about my personal lack of knowledge effecting my views on a section’s quality. For example, In the introduction section of Lab C, there was a clear mention that the experiment was conducted using “work (progressive ratio) and non-work (fixed time) alternatives”. Just reading this section alone left me confused whether that concept needed further explanation, or I personally didn’t understand what it meant when it was, in reality, suffice. Only because I immediately allowed myself to analyze the next section did I realize the former was true, as there was an entire page dedicated n the methods section explaining that very concept. Now that I understood the concept fully, I was able to confidently say that the introduction could’ve at least added the money acquiring aspect and the incentive to choose “work” over “non-work”. Secondly, analyzing each report on its own allowed me a better perspective on the overall quality of the paper. For example, each section in Lab A compared to Lab B seemed lacking and empty in content, simply due to the content-size difference. However, understanding that Lab A’s entire report had a condense layout, I was able to be objective and analyze its sections by its own standards. It was still important for me to use each report as a tool to critique the others, and I did not forgo that.
I didn’t find much trouble while analyzing each report, as I was very confident using the textbook guidelines in order to decide where a section was strong an where it was lacking. However, when it came to organize my reviews to form my essay, that is where I found trouble. My main, underlying issue was how to properly state a thesis for each paragraph. Because I combined multiple sections into one paragraph of analyzing, I had to separate my thesis statements throughout my paragraph. For example, In my first main paragraph, I started by stating “each (abstract) was meant to summarize the report, state what was discovered and concluded, and mention the motivation behind the study”. Then later, in the same paragraph, I had to state “The introduction of a proper lab report is supposed to establish the significance and relevance of the work conducted in the experiment. This includes introducing a convincing hypothesis and stating previous studies to either logically support or argue against.” These two thesis statements were inevitable due to my essay layout, and so although it did create a little chaos in my structure, I don’t place much blame on myself. The one area I was able to control, and believe I did a fair job in doing so, was giving each section its own thesis and having the analyzation of each section relate to that thesis. If I stated that the Methods sections need to provide enough detail to replicate the experiment, my evaluation of the reports were completely based on that thought.
Overall, my analyzing process was extremely smooth. I had set guidelines to base my evaluations on and analyzed each report on its own while still using the other reports to highlight strengths and weaknesses. Although I was dealing with a lot of content which sometimes felt very scattered , I was able to effectively organize my assessments of the reports and properly lay them out throughout my paper.
