At the beginning of this course, before learning all the lessons, my perception of writing is that writing is a way of expression that contains little technical content, such as an incomplete format. However, after learning the lesson from this course, I have a new cognitive on writing: writing should have a more precise and complete format like APA or MLA. Then if your writing has used other people’s sentences that you feel fit to your essay or writing, you need to cite the sentence and provide the provenance and the author of that sentence. Also, I have found out that sometimes if needed, writing such as an essay can include images to help improve the understanding of the essay information. For example, I’m mentioning a mouse. To let the reader know what a mouse looks like, I can provide an image of a mouse in front or after the paragraph mentioning the mouse.

After gaining a new awareness of writing, the most interesting assignment I thought about in this course was the Engineering proposal. What I like about this assignment is that it is group work; in this work, we are required to create a new product that the market doesn’t or hasn’t made out. Creating a new product is the most challenging part of this assignment; during this assignment, we can’t be unconstrained to develop a product that cannot be achieved in real life, and we also have to figure out many problems that the product may have, such as the production line, how long can the product be used, what kind price should it be…etc. However, finding the solution to all these challenges can be attractive, but the most interesting part of this assignment was creativity. Creating a new product can take a lot of time; the creation process, such as drawing the product’s image, is enjoyable.

As the course is now ending, I have gotten eight-course learning outcomes from this course. The first-course learning outcome is “Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” This outcome was achieved by all the assignments I did on the course. My mother language is Chinese Mandarin, including writing and speaking; my audiences are American who speak English; to persuade my audience, the language I use for all of my works is English.

The second-course learning outcome is “Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” Beginning from the assignment “Lab Report Analysis,” the essay is done by brainstorming the idea of what I’m going to write, then placing a draft for the essay; after reviewing by the professor and giving feedback, I will start revising and editing new information for the essay. After everything is done, I will write the self-assessment to conclude what I did in this essay and the challenges I faced when I did it.

Then is the third-course learning outcome “Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.” I achieved this course learning outcome by doing the assignment “Technical Description.” The product I did was the digital art board used for drawing on the PC; for myself; I understand what a digital art board is and how to use it; however, it doesn’t the audience understand it, so I have to do a more precise explanation of this product, to compatibility audience’s expectations.

This image is the explanation of the digital art board.

The fourth-course learning outcome is “Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” This outcome is achieved through the group project “Engineering Proposal + Presentation.” We must write an essay and a five-minute video presentation for this group project. I did the paper with one of the group mates, and the slide was done by three of us. I also achieved the fifth-course learning outcome in this project: “Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.” While we are creating the product, we also have to figure out the price of this product, which takes us a lot of time to decide the price. Doing the process, we have to research all the merits of a similar product and then estimate the cost of our product.

The sixth-course learning outcome is the “Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing.” This outcome is also achieved through the assignment “Engineering Proposal + Presentation,” when we use citations to explain the history of air conditioning and essential parts of it such as the Refrigerant R-410a, Copper Tube, etc.

The seventh-course learning outcome is “Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.” This outcome is achieved through the assignment “Lab Report Analysis,” in this assignment, I used CCNY Library, this website, to research the lab report I will use. The two labs report I found in CCNY Library is “Efficient Decolorization of Water and Oil-Soluble Azo Dyes by Enterococcus avium Treated with HP-[beta]-CD” and “Investigation of the fatigue modulus decay in cement-stabilized base material by considering the difference between compressive and tensile modulus.

Then the eighth-course learning outcome, “Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources),” This outcome also being achieved through the assignment “Lab Report Analysis,” when I wrote “a major group of dyes causing environmental concern because of their color, bio-recalcitrance, and potential toxicity to animals and humans” (Pierce et al., 2003; Forgacs et al., 2004). The color made by Azo Dye could be toxic to animals and humans; it can cause carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to the creature, including humans (Chen, 2023).” The citation is cited in APA format and gives the paraphrasing.

In conclusion, in this course, I have learned to use APA format to write the essay and understand and learn the eight-course learning outcomes. As I further improve myself and keep in mind all the things I have learned in this course, it will help me succeed in the future.