Reflection Essay

In the beginning of this class, I had never really written anything that would be considered technical
writing before. To start the class, I noticed that my writing needed a lot of work to be able to get up to
the level that was being asked. Throughout the class I felt that my technical writing steadily improved.
The area that I believe that I have improved the most in is being able to write in plain language to a
novice target audience. This is something that I have learned from the many different assignments that
we have had, lots of practice being the reason why I believe that it has improved the most. The goal that
I had set out for myself in the beginning of this course is the stereotypical, to become a better writer and
to furthermore my knowledge about what technical writing really is. I chose this goal because this is
something that is going to be a huge part of my major and job life after my time at UNC Charlotte. I do
believe that I have accomplished the goal that I set for myself. This happened through all the
assignments that were put in place as I discussed earlier. Even the small discussion assignments such as
the editing assignments helped me see what a positive and negative example of each type of documents
was, which helped my writing. Seeing these examples, working with others through peer review, and the
lectures have deepened my knowledge on the different aspects of writing within the technical field. The
assignment that I am most proud of personally would most likely be the formal report packet. The
reason that this would be the fact that I believe I the amount of work involved with this was the greatest
of all of the assignments we had, not to mention my highest graded one as well. I thought that when I
was working through it though, I was more comfortable when writing the assignment. I also thought
that I personally was able to follow the structure that was laid out for the assignment a lot better
perhaps than the other major projects that were given. If I could add any assignment would be
something such as how to formulate a technical presentation, or perhaps how to write a script for a
technical presentation so that you are not looking at the screen the whole time instead of those you are
giving a presentation to. If I had to edit one of the assignments within the class, it would the workplace
correspondence packet. Although the packet is very useful, I think that the memo is something that
would be more beneficial than the email portion of the assignment. As I stated before, I already came
into the course knowing for the most part about how to write emails in the right structure. The memo is
something that I found very useful though so I believe that this part of the assignment should not be
edited as much. In the end though I am very glad that I had the opportunity to take this class and the
skills that I gained throughout this course as well.