Zachary Onisick

Mrs. Sindelar

ENGL 2116-022

August 1, 2019

Reflection Essay
Introduction
To begin this reflection, I would like to give a brief thank you for the experience that you have
provided. I did actually enjoy this class, despite the way the work-load piled on top of everything
else I had to do. I am grateful for the effort you have put into the material and the jovial attitude
that you brought to the classroom each day. I wish you luck in your further education and hope
that you have an excellent career.

Writing Development
This class has definitely forced me to adapt in ways I did not expect. Prior to this, I had only ever
written meaningless papers for Liberal Arts and History classes. This sudden introduction into
purposeful papers was quite an enjoyable one and taught me quite a bit. My writing style has
become more refined and polished and I have learned the basics of a number of useful document
types. I think this class covered its material very well and taught me quite a bit that I didn’t
already know. Tacking on extra material like grammar and sentence structure would just bog
down the interesting stuff with things we should have learned years ago.

Course Goals
While we did skip the goal setting portion of the class, I did set a few goals for myself over the
semester. My primary goal is to graduate with at least a basic understanding of every class that I
take. This goal was completely filled by forcing me to write a ton of words in such a short
amount of time that the material was drilled in pretty deep. My secondary goal is to maintain my
4.0. I’m not sure if I will manage this one because so much of my work is still ungraded, but I
am continuing to put as much effort as I can spare into this class to pursue it. My final goal for
the semester was to have fun. Each of these goals were adeptly accommodated by the course and
your teaching. The only complaint I have is slow grading, but I can 100% understand your
difficulties and I place no blame.
Assignments
The assignment that I am most proud of is definitely the white paper. I haven’t written many
papers of that length, being a computer science major, so I was extremely pleased when I got the
grade that I did. I also had literally no experience doing any sort of cover page, so I was really
happy when it turned out how it did. It was also really funny to rub the grade in my girlfriend’s
face when I scored higher than she did.
The visualization assignment was so interesting that it deserves an entire paragraph dedicated to
it. While it was a really weird assignment, I actually had a blast creating it. Having a virtual 360-
degree tour of a location as an assignment in a technical writing class was a really creative and
fun idea. The only problem was the amount of time that we were given to create the assignment.
Since we took the first few days discussing material and the concept, we only had two days to
find locations to take pictures, get there, and then record all the scripts and material. Overall, I
would say the visualization assignment was a good addition to the class but needs just a bit more
polish in the directions that we were given.
If I could edit any of the assignments, it would probably be the memo. I hate group activities
because of distribution of skill, so I think it would be better to break it up into individual
submissions. You could keep the usability testing as a group assignment, have each group
member submit their own version of the assignment, and then have everyone compare their
results. If I were given the chance, I definitely would abstain from adding any more assignments
to the class. The pace seemed a bit fast already, so adding another assignment would be kind of
rough in a summer class situation.