Dear future Fernando,

If you’re reading this, I hope that you have achieved getting an engineering degree and become a mechanical engineer. Hopefully, through your journey, you still remember and use the material that you have learned from previous classes for your career. Especially, from your Writing for Engineering class (ENGL 21007), which gave you a lot of experience writing and formatting these different genres of writing. With the goal always being to always keep the purpose and audience in mind when ever doing lab report, tech-description, or any other genera learned in this class. In case you need a refresher, here are some of the things we’ve learned from this class, through the help of these questions.

To what extent have I achieved the course learning objectives? 

It was pretty obvious that during this class, we were constantly practicing our learning objectives. No matter what type of genre of writing we were doing, we were constantly making sure that we had research on our curtain topic. Such as with a memo, researching the individual’s background and position within the organization are vital in order to know what words are needed to use to address the individual we were writing too. While also researching, we also make sure that we gave credit to anything that wasn’t ours, citing in APA formatting. We also used and acknowledged how rhetorical elements help our writing, needing to know our purpose, audience, genera, stance and so on. Also, every assignment we did was met with many revisions from our instructor and peers. In order to strengthen our writing, whether it was to explain further, missing of a rhetorical element or provide more context.

In what ways have my perceptions on what writing is and does evolved this semester?

My perception on what writing is has evolved because before I use to think writing as a way to entertain people through fictional writing, or us to persuade the reader of my stance. As I finished this semester, I started to take into account the specific audience I will be addressing in whichever genera witting I was doing. While also always having the purpose in mind and used all the rhetorical situation in order to make it easier for me to make sure that I have all the necessary information to either persuade like in the engineering proposal or provide information like in a tech description. It became part of my writing to have all these rhetorical situations to be addressed in order for the reader to fully and clearly understand our purpose in writing. As engineers, we require that our audience understands our purpose with the evolution of my writing through this semester, it has made my writing clearer to understand and sound more professional with the research done.

How does the audience impact the content and purpose of text?

When looking at audience, we have to know who will be reading or even who might hear our writing. While also having to take into account the audience’s academic and reading level, to know what words could be used to make it easier for the audience to understand, getting our purpose and content across. In a sense the audience does impact these two rhetorical elements, since they affect the way, the information will be presented to the audience. For instance, when I was doing my technical description, I was writing to inform my audience on how to us and background of an impact driver. Even though my purpose was to inform, my audience consisted of construction workers/ homeowners that I believed would have a high school reading level, as I have family members that are construction workers that have a high school diploma or equivalent to it. Making sure that the content is easy to understand, using high school level vocabulary and providing more images, then writing. Furthermore, the witting portions were very minimal as well, especially for instructions and part, were made into bullet points in order to prevent the reader from getting lost in reading the instructions or parts section.

Was there a challenge in writing across genres and addressing specific audiences?

There wasn’t that much of a challenge when writing across genres and addressing specific audience towards the end of the semester. I understood that each genre has a purpose, whether it is to inform or persuade, which the audience would always be addressed no matter the genre. As we were getting use too addressing the rhetorical situations in my writing it became easier but there were still times where it was a bit confusing. For instance, the engineering proposal was a genre with multiple components like having to create a web site, presentation slides and paper that even though they were part of same genera, they were different media, which audience did change a bit in this assignment. When it came down to the writing portion there was three main people, we were addressing, which in my case were mostly government officials. With this in mind, I understood my audience but with the presentation portion the audience became a bit different, as the audience could be more than the three main people and could be the residents that could be hearing the presentation of the proposal. Yet, we still managed to keep in mind the three main people in our audience but still manage to acknowledge the multiple people that would hear our presentation portion.

What happens to the other rhetorical elements when you change one of the elements within the situation? for example, when you change media, do the other elements change?

When we change media, some of the other elements do change a bit. This was demonstrated through the PSA; it was meant to bring awareness towards a certain issue and the method to get the message across was through using a video. Although the genera are a PSA, the media could have been anything and by making the media a video, the content changes. The information provided in each clip have to be sort and concise, in the 45 seconds provided. We also have to make sure that the visuals are easy to read and visually pleasing for the audience to pay attention too as they walk past the PSA. While the audience also gets affected, since the PSA will be able to target a larger audience, but could target a specific group to get more interaction with the PSA. In my case I targeted college students as they will be more willing to volunteer or join the organization tack the issue of pollution in New York. However, there are elements that don’t change as much, like the exigence or stance, whether the PSA was made into a flyer or poster, what makes me want to write will stay the same. With the PSA, what makes me write was that as a New Yorker, New York has a serious littering problem of plastic. Keeping the same attitude towards the issue and I hope to get people’s attention to get people to support/volunteer through helping organizations like Sure We Can.

Sincerely,

Fernando Cielo