Kriston Waugh  

Department of English, City College of New York  

ENGL 21007: Writing for Engineers

The Self-Assessment Essay

Professor Sara Jacobson 

May 19, 2025

During my time in the Writing for Engineering class I learnt to fundamentally improve my writing by engaging with the background information provided in essay prompts and supporting articles. This self-assessment essay aims to inform the audience reading it about my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to my writing and what I should be improving on going forward.

While I was in class, we would often go over a digital textbook with different elements for writing a good essay. In Chapter 3: Audience Awareness showed us examples of situations and how a certain group of people think about this topic versus how the audience reading the chapter thinks about it. When reading how each person reading an essay doesn’t have the same knowledge of what the author is talking about, I realized that my writing should be aware of the specific audience or group of people I am trying to inform. I should base the way I describe certain aspects on the preexisting knowledge of my audience.

The assignment that allowed me to understand this concept was the technical description. In this assignment, I had to base a description of a product (Raspberry Pi 4 Model B). I had to do it in a way where I had to explain each component and how it functions to an audience, that has no idea what the product is and is only basing what they know about the product from my technical description and images used in the assignment. When taking this into account, I used rhetorical terms to provide evidence by citing from websites and quotes from the official product website and other storefronts. I also tried to understand my audience, who had no prior knowledge of the product I’m writing about in my technical description, and made sure to include every important detail, including the ones that seem obvious, because someone can always end up confused.

Although I improved by reaching my audience with the technical description, my greatest weakness throughout the semester was learning how to use the college library’s database and archives. This is even more apparent in the lab report assignment and how I struggled to cite my work correctly and properly rhetorically analyze the lab report. When trying to complete this assignment, I had trouble finding an article that had enough information for me to conduct a rhetorical analysis, which caused me to draft several different essays. This could have been avoided if I had taken my professor’s advice of basing our lab report assignment on our intended majors. But at the time, I wasn’t sure about what I wanted my major to be, and that caused even more confusion when it came to finding a lab report related to myself.

When I settled on a lab report about flipped classrooms versus traditional classrooms, I explored the advantages and disadvantages in a computer science class setting. While I was working on the assignment, I misread the instructions, and I didn’t analyze the actual lab report. Instead, I summarized it and didn’t add much value to the preexisting lab report. Although my lab report was not my strongest assignment, I eventually started to understand rhetorical analysis and applied it to other assignments like this self-assessment I am writing now, which allowed me to improve upon my initial mistake.

The assignment where I feel like I improved the most on what the engineering proposal group project. In this project I improved on making several drafts to share and collaborate with my group members on if the information provided was acceptable. When presenting our project in class, we added more background details, more images, and cited our sources for our information and the images we used in the assignment.

My group work skills improved because I took my other members’ opinions into consideration when revising my work and even had some group members collaborate with writing a section based on the information my group and I gathered. My productivity increased dramatically while doing this assignment because I didn’t feel like I had to second guess myself when writing information because I had people to review my work and add insights, so that I could feel more confident in my writing. When it came time to create a slideshow presentation, my group and I used a different approach by summarizing the information in our document using bullet points, but also using images and providing cited websites to make up for the lack of information provided compared to the original proposal. The slideshow method allowed us to reach our audience in a more hands-on way, so they could understand our proposed product in a streamlined way.

Overall, my time spent writing for engineering class has helped me become a more mindful, accommodating, and collaborative writer. I have strengthened my understanding of addressing my audience while writing, using concepts like rhetorical strategies to strengthen my writing. Although I have struggled in the past with the topic of rhetorical analysis, I’ve recognized my flaws with the concepts and have already started to improve upon them. Even though this class is now over, I still plan to work on strengthening my writing so I can be a confident writer in the future, who never doubts himself about whether his work is acceptable enough.