Name: Aaron Anderson

Date: 8/7/2019

Reflection Essay
Writing Development
When looking over the work I produced this summer, both in and out of class, I noticed an
improvement with the quality of work I produced. Most of the increased quality came from being
able to reduce the amount of “fluff” that goes into a normal essay. With technical writing it was
much easier for me to reduce the amount of unnecessary information included. Another aspect
of my writing that I have seen improved is the way information is presented. Prior to this class I
feel like my emails, letters, and papers/reports were thrown together in ways that made little to
no sense, whereas now I can place the information properly under headings and subheadings
to allow more readers to understand the content.
Course Goals
My goal at the beginning of the course was to become better at writing technical documents.
Both of my majors rely heavily on documentation, reports, and emails therefore knowing how to
properly write and convey the information is a must have. I feel as though this course did help
me accomplish my goal as well as taught me unrelated things such as using a table in the
header for name and date instead of using the underscore, or how to properly use track
changes in a document. Overall there is not much regarding how much is taught during the
course. It would have been nice, provide more time was added, to do a technical report as well
as a white paper but I also understand that a technical report would have a much smaller
audience and not be as useful for some people in the room. A technical report would also
require having data either provided or gathered.
Assignments
I feel like I am most proud of the white paper assignment simply due to the fact that it involved a
topic that I had never done research on and wrote a paper on not only its effects but possible
solutions. Having gone from the first day not really knowing what to expect in the course to the
end of the second week having written a decently long paper based upon actual research and
findings is a feat in and of itself. However, doing that with the proper prose, design, audience
that was learned just a week prior is much more difficult. One assignment that I would change
would be the visualization assignment. While not included in the portfolio it was simultaneously
one of my favorites, and least favorite assignments to complete. I enjoyed the assignment due
to the outdoor nature of it; not many classes have you go and take photospheres of locations, or
go outside at all. However the issues that came with trying to find locations that were relevant to
my topic, Ice, while in North Carolina in the middle of summer made this assignment not fun to
complete. If I were to change this assignment I would allow the use of other peoples’ photo
spheres for 2 of the 3 spheres. Essentially have students be in charge of taking one sphere
themselves, as well as narrate for all 3 spheres. This way students still get experience with
visualization and voiceovers, but some of the stress of finding related places is removed. As I
said above I also feel that a technical report containing raw data meant for internal audiences
would be a great addition to the course.