Joshua Valle

5/10/24

ENGL 21007

At the beginning of the semester I had little to no knowledge of what it meant to write professionally as an engineer. I saw this when I wrote my Technical Description during the part where I am describing the components of a bike wheel. My work wasn’t very descriptive and it seemed very rushed. It is clear when I write my conclusion and put ”To conclude, the bike wheel is composed of numerous inner and external components that all work together to allow an efficient momentum for bikes.” This sentence was my conclusion which could have been better formulated instead of just a sentence. 

As we started the group research proposal, I struggled because of a change in ideas from my group members. Originally,  in my draft I wrote “For that reason we decided to look into the science behind how cold ice cream needs to freeze, ice cubes won’t be enough, and even sometimes putting it in our home freezers isn’t enough. We will be using a styrofoam cup to create an iced salt water bath to get the water to -10 degree celsius in order to see if we can make ice cream at that temperature. We expect a soft serve type of ice cream to come out with this temperature instead of a hard style of ice cream” with the idea of making ice cream from iced water at a temperature affected by salt and sugar. Then it changed to how salt and sugar affected the freezing point of water which I had a disagreement with this idea but to not cause any problems I let it be. This made me reluctant to keep putting in effort which affected my performance in communicating with my group members.

When it came to the lab report, I was given the part to do the methods and materials part and I started off by writing the present tense as if It was the same as the proposal but then I realized my mistakes and started writing the lab report in the past tense. “First, the ice bath solution was prepared with a solution that consisted of ¾ cup of ice and 1 teaspoon of salt in a styrofoam cup. Continue this by stirring the mixtures in both cups until fully dissolved. After this the temperature of the salt ice solution which ended up being negative ten degree celsius was checked. Followed by water being poured into the salt mixture to see how long it would take to freeze at this temperature. Lastly, the thermometer was rinsed and dried so that the salt water wouldn’t mix in with the testing solutions.” I saw improvement in the fact that I went from writing in the past tense to writing it as it should have been, which is in past tense but without including words such as We and I.

When it came to my overall performance this semester, I should have participated a lot more and came to class on time. I missed the classes that involved our portfolio so I lacked the basis. My goal for this class was to get an idea of what it means to write as an engineer through experience. Now at the end of the semester, I see that I did get a good amount of experience writing as an engineer in this class and I have a good basis on how to write a variety of things for future references.