Welcome to Ruby's Writing Portfolio
So let's come clean here. How many times have you gone through life (however much you've lived of it) wondering "When will I ever need to use this in the future!?" The phrase is so overused that it almost seems like a stepping stone in your life's education journey.
As you get older however, you start to realize that a lot of the things you have learnt are in fact necessary. That TI-83 calculator that you complained about having too many unnecessary functions and formulas is now being chucked against the wall for not having all the functions and formulas that you need. Those 5 paragraph essays that your 5th grade teacher consistently made you write every Fridays has now become second nature as you begin to focus more on your thesis and persuasion skills for writing papers. Those formulas you learnt in your statistics class might help you to beat the lottery system or deal a good hand in poker in the future.
OK, the last one was a joke (pretty bad, I know). But sooner or later, you begin to realize just how important some skills can be for your future. I had a revelation of my own these past few months, and this portfolio is here to describe my journey along its path.
This revelation involved me realizing how important writing skills will be in anything you decide to do in your future. For me, I have always wanted to be an engineer (or something involving math and physics). Math was the main subject that I excelled in and I took pride in that because I love it. Writing on the other hand was something that I never truly had an affinity for. I always had trouble with my introductions, transitions, persuasions...you name it. When I entered college, I groaned when I saw the requirements for writing classes; I thought to myself "I'll just get them over with as quickly as I can so I can just focus on my math and science classes". So that was the mindset that I entered my English Composition II class with.
Needless to say, I am leaving this class with a completely different understanding and new found appreciation for writing. This whole semester, we traveled through an educational journey that opened our eyes to the vast world of writing and its techniques. As an engineering student, I thought that I was free from writing for the rest of my life; formulas, derivations, measurements - I thought that that was the gist of all I needed to do in the future. But now, my attitude has changed because I was forced to consider what was always there - the proposals, the cover letters, the abstracts, the bid letters, the letters of interest etc. Writing, writing and even more writing! And it wasn't just my department. Within our class, the microbiologists, the psychologists, the speech therapists; everyone was realizing how important writing was in their field.
I went through four different stages in my discovery:
The purpose of this portfolio is to showcase how I've developed my knowledge and understanding of writing in engineering. Three out of the four papers have been chosen for demonstration in this portfolio, including their first drafts. I chose the first one (What is Academic Writing?) because I feel like it does a good job in pointing out the main points of academic writing. I chose the second one (Interview Paper) that contained my primary research because I felt like it was my best work. It encompassed a lot of details that helped me to understand how I will need my writing skills in the future. I chose the third one (Literature Review), the one that covered secondary research, because I feel like it was my least successful piece of writing. It was poorly written without much persuasion skills used and the sources weren't as credible as they would have been if I had been able to find some distinctive scholarly journals about writing in the field of Civil Engineering.
This portfolio also includes blog posts that answers some questions about academic writing. It is all easily navigable at the top.
I sincerely hope that this portfolio will help you to see how I've grown in my knowledge and understanding of how important writing is in the professional field; I also hope that you might learn something as well.
Happy exploring,
Ruby
As you get older however, you start to realize that a lot of the things you have learnt are in fact necessary. That TI-83 calculator that you complained about having too many unnecessary functions and formulas is now being chucked against the wall for not having all the functions and formulas that you need. Those 5 paragraph essays that your 5th grade teacher consistently made you write every Fridays has now become second nature as you begin to focus more on your thesis and persuasion skills for writing papers. Those formulas you learnt in your statistics class might help you to beat the lottery system or deal a good hand in poker in the future.
OK, the last one was a joke (pretty bad, I know). But sooner or later, you begin to realize just how important some skills can be for your future. I had a revelation of my own these past few months, and this portfolio is here to describe my journey along its path.
This revelation involved me realizing how important writing skills will be in anything you decide to do in your future. For me, I have always wanted to be an engineer (or something involving math and physics). Math was the main subject that I excelled in and I took pride in that because I love it. Writing on the other hand was something that I never truly had an affinity for. I always had trouble with my introductions, transitions, persuasions...you name it. When I entered college, I groaned when I saw the requirements for writing classes; I thought to myself "I'll just get them over with as quickly as I can so I can just focus on my math and science classes". So that was the mindset that I entered my English Composition II class with.
Needless to say, I am leaving this class with a completely different understanding and new found appreciation for writing. This whole semester, we traveled through an educational journey that opened our eyes to the vast world of writing and its techniques. As an engineering student, I thought that I was free from writing for the rest of my life; formulas, derivations, measurements - I thought that that was the gist of all I needed to do in the future. But now, my attitude has changed because I was forced to consider what was always there - the proposals, the cover letters, the abstracts, the bid letters, the letters of interest etc. Writing, writing and even more writing! And it wasn't just my department. Within our class, the microbiologists, the psychologists, the speech therapists; everyone was realizing how important writing was in their field.
I went through four different stages in my discovery:
- First I attempted to define technical writing, and proceeded to analyze academic writings for their writing attributes.
- Then I was asked to come up with my own research questions pertaining to Civil Engineering (my branch within engineering) to see how I can connect these writing attributes to my major.
- The next step was to conduct my own primary research about my questions to see if I can get some first hand experience for my knowledge. I did this through a face-to-face interview.
- Finally, I had to perform secondary research to gain some scholarly insight about writing in the field of Civil Engineering that would get me closer to answering my own research questions.
The purpose of this portfolio is to showcase how I've developed my knowledge and understanding of writing in engineering. Three out of the four papers have been chosen for demonstration in this portfolio, including their first drafts. I chose the first one (What is Academic Writing?) because I feel like it does a good job in pointing out the main points of academic writing. I chose the second one (Interview Paper) that contained my primary research because I felt like it was my best work. It encompassed a lot of details that helped me to understand how I will need my writing skills in the future. I chose the third one (Literature Review), the one that covered secondary research, because I feel like it was my least successful piece of writing. It was poorly written without much persuasion skills used and the sources weren't as credible as they would have been if I had been able to find some distinctive scholarly journals about writing in the field of Civil Engineering.
This portfolio also includes blog posts that answers some questions about academic writing. It is all easily navigable at the top.
I sincerely hope that this portfolio will help you to see how I've grown in my knowledge and understanding of how important writing is in the professional field; I also hope that you might learn something as well.
Happy exploring,
Ruby