My writing has become better throughout this course in more than one aspect. When looking through this portfolio, one will see many of my major assignments, including some draft work. when reading the memo, technical description, lab reports, PSA, and finally, the engineering proposal, one will see how my writing has changed over time to include more thought-through rhetorical elements and more nuanced styles of writing. in this essay, I will be addressing a few questions: how my writing has evolved throughout this semester, to what extent did I achieve the course learning outcomes, and how does the audience impact the purpose and content of a text.

Taking this course has developed my understanding of rhetorical elements and helped me learn how to use them. From the memo to the proposal, my use of the rhetorical elements improved and it became more clear when and how to use them. By the time we composed our engineering proposal, we knew how to utilize the elements and apply them to our writing. While I  still hold the same attitude about writing, a boring task, I now know how to do it better and faster. Writing is a tool, like any other tool, and learning how to use it well makes life easier as one can communicate ideas clearly.

Personally, I think I have achieved most if not all of the course learning outcomes, and that is evident in my writing. the first CLO was evidently met with the technical part of our engineering proposal, we considered the audience’s familiarity and understanding of certain concepts and avoided jargon, and used more common language instead. That ensured that our audience, who were not experts in water filtration systems or engineering, could still understand our project and the filtration process clearly. We have also included a chart that presented the process using imagery to make it even easier to follow. The second CLO was met in every single assignment I have composed including, and especially, this one. I have drafted and revised every single one of my assignments and revised them again for this assignment. One cannot write a perfect paper immediately, writing is a process, and it requires drafting to end up with a good final product. A good example would be the technical description composed, as I took into consideration my peers’ comments and revised my content multiple times to make sure it is written well and presents the research I had done on the topic. The third and fifth CLO’s were met together as genre conventions that were done for each project helped us manage and understand what the rhetorical elements that should be like and how they should be presented. while it took me a while to grasp the stance, I do think that my understanding of it improved towards the end of the course. Examples of that can be seen in the proposal as well as the PSA where we stated our stance on the topic. In our proposal, our stance was the people experiencing water scarcity in Puerto Rico due to natural disasters, and action needed to be taken. That concludes CLO six. The fourth CLO was met with our engineering proposal as a lot of group work occurred there. CLO 7 and 8 were met with the PSA project as we used the CCNY library resources to find the information regarding the NYRP project and we had paraphrased and cited all of the information. This concludes the course learning outcomes.

Throughout this course, in every assignment we have done, we have mentioned how one of the rhetorical elements, audience, affects the purpose and content of the text. The audience is who we are writing to, it can be primary, secondary, or tertiary audiences. The audience can therefore change the purpose and content of the text based on the outcome one is trying to achieve. For example, in our PSA project, our audience was the CCNY community, which affected the content and the purpose of our PSA as we had to avoid using jargon and simplify our vocabulary to more commonly used terms. We also had to explain the problem and why it was important to do something about it. We also added volunteer opportunities to our project so that the CCNY community can join in on the efforts. If my audience was different, for example, a certain audience that specializes in genetic modification or replantation of species my content and purpose would not be to convince them to join the volunteering team but rather to join the team to help modify the trees for replantation. Additionally, less background information would be present, and more technical information would be added to the project along with smaller details and jargon.

My hope is that this essay shows how the course learning outcomes have been achieved along with how this course has changed me as a writer. Throughout this course I have learned that engineers need to know who they are writing to before they begin writing. I have learned this through multiple assignments, some of which are present on this portfolio. They walk through these we’ll show one how I developed as a writer throughout this semester.