We wrote a couple of blog posts this semester, mostly to help in developing our understanding of the concepts we were learning throughout the semester. I picked two of mine that I thought were the most relevant to my developments in this class to showcase here. The titles are links to the readings.
"Finding Your Way In: Invention as Inquiry Based Learning in First Year Writing," by Lessner and Craig
Out of the new invention strategies you have learned in this
chapter, which do you think would be most helpful as you
transition into writing in higher education? Why do you think
the invention strategy you choose would work well and in what
way do you see yourself using it?
A combination of focused freewriting and visual outlining would definitely be the key to aiding me in my writing inventions. Once I gain a topic, I can first see myself using the skill of focused free-writing, just composing as many lines as possible that come to my mind and are related to the given topic. From those lines of freewriting, I can then be able to organize them into sub-related topics and integrate them into some form of visual drawing to represent an outline. Regular freewriting helps me to get my point across but most of the time, I find it difficult to write and come up with ideas when I don't have a specific topic - unlike the case of focused freewriting. Visual outlining is an extremely useful tool as well because I am inherently a very visual person when it comes to learning and creating; when the dots are connected through pictures and/or some form of drawings, the focus becomes immediately clear. Introducing a form of art into my writing inventions should produce a lot of opportunities for better results.
chapter, which do you think would be most helpful as you
transition into writing in higher education? Why do you think
the invention strategy you choose would work well and in what
way do you see yourself using it?
A combination of focused freewriting and visual outlining would definitely be the key to aiding me in my writing inventions. Once I gain a topic, I can first see myself using the skill of focused free-writing, just composing as many lines as possible that come to my mind and are related to the given topic. From those lines of freewriting, I can then be able to organize them into sub-related topics and integrate them into some form of visual drawing to represent an outline. Regular freewriting helps me to get my point across but most of the time, I find it difficult to write and come up with ideas when I don't have a specific topic - unlike the case of focused freewriting. Visual outlining is an extremely useful tool as well because I am inherently a very visual person when it comes to learning and creating; when the dots are connected through pictures and/or some form of drawings, the focus becomes immediately clear. Introducing a form of art into my writing inventions should produce a lot of opportunities for better results.
"What is Academic Writing?" By Lennie Irwin
Think of a writing assignment that you will need to complete this semester. Who’s your audience? What’s the occasion or context? What’s your message? What’s your purpose? What documents/genres are used? How does all that compare to the writing you are doing in this class?
One of the writing assignments that I will be required to complete this semester is a movie analysis/review in my Engineering Analysis (statics) class. The paper will be closely related to a presentation that a partner and I will have to give to the entire class and professor. For our paper, we have to talk about the structures that get destroyed in a movie (most likely an action-packed movie) and analyze whether we think that it is plausible for a cartload of talking chimpanzee to bring down a whole bridge or whether a suspension of a certain length, force, and material is able to lift a certain amount of weight off the ground. Obviously, the movies are for entertainment purposes only and Hollywood is allowed to make up scenarios and defy the laws of physics for the sake of show business. The purpose of this paper, however, is to demonstrate our understanding of statics and increase our interests as engineers when it comes to the real world. By sharing our paper (and presentation), we will help intensify our intended audiences interest as well.
This writing has both similarities and differences to what we will most likely be doing in English Composition II. Both my paper for my statics class and the assignments that we will have to write in this class will have to be structured with a main purpose and an audience. We have to use our means of persuasion to gather the interest of those that will read our work. The obvious difference will be that there will be a multitude of technical terms for my statics paper; the audience will already have prior knowledge of the laws and formulas that will be demonstrated in my paper so they will be able to understand it. This is probably not the case for most of the papers we will write in Eng Comp; our writing will probably be able to be easily understood by an audience of a vast spectrum unlike the statics paper which will mostly be comprehensible (and interesting) to engineering students and professors. Also, the papers for Eng Comp may require a lot of sources and a bibliography/works cited page. Formulas and laws (which will be learnt and known by the time the paper is due) will suffice for the statics paper and need not be cited.
One of the writing assignments that I will be required to complete this semester is a movie analysis/review in my Engineering Analysis (statics) class. The paper will be closely related to a presentation that a partner and I will have to give to the entire class and professor. For our paper, we have to talk about the structures that get destroyed in a movie (most likely an action-packed movie) and analyze whether we think that it is plausible for a cartload of talking chimpanzee to bring down a whole bridge or whether a suspension of a certain length, force, and material is able to lift a certain amount of weight off the ground. Obviously, the movies are for entertainment purposes only and Hollywood is allowed to make up scenarios and defy the laws of physics for the sake of show business. The purpose of this paper, however, is to demonstrate our understanding of statics and increase our interests as engineers when it comes to the real world. By sharing our paper (and presentation), we will help intensify our intended audiences interest as well.
This writing has both similarities and differences to what we will most likely be doing in English Composition II. Both my paper for my statics class and the assignments that we will have to write in this class will have to be structured with a main purpose and an audience. We have to use our means of persuasion to gather the interest of those that will read our work. The obvious difference will be that there will be a multitude of technical terms for my statics paper; the audience will already have prior knowledge of the laws and formulas that will be demonstrated in my paper so they will be able to understand it. This is probably not the case for most of the papers we will write in Eng Comp; our writing will probably be able to be easily understood by an audience of a vast spectrum unlike the statics paper which will mostly be comprehensible (and interesting) to engineering students and professors. Also, the papers for Eng Comp may require a lot of sources and a bibliography/works cited page. Formulas and laws (which will be learnt and known by the time the paper is due) will suffice for the statics paper and need not be cited.