Reflection Essay

In this course I have seen a lot of improvement in my writing. Being that English wasn’t my first
language and the struggle I had with grammar at an early age, my writing has never been good, and I have
always been striving for improvement. Having a course where I was formally taught the rules of writing
in a formal/professional space really made a difference in my ability to write and my confidence in said
ability. The goal I set for myself at the beginning of the class was to be able to write a professional email
that I was content with, for any request or situation. In the past I would often hold off from responding to
messages until I had a peer edit my work and make significant changes, this was in part due to my poor
grammar, but also to my lack of confidence that my writing was proper enough.

I’m very happy to say that I met this goal and have become more confident with writing not only because
of this class but also my job. With my new job I found myself writing emails all the time and becoming
very used to the format I need to use in a professional setting. Now while I still revise my emails, I really
don’t feel like I need to have anyone read them and I feel like I’m prepared to write an email for any
situation that I need. I did however feel like this process was glossed over a bit in the curriculum of the
class, maybe this was due to the accelerated pace of the summer class but I found that 1 day on email
format was very difficult to work with and that most of my improvements came from my interpretations
of other chapters and applying it to the emails I was writing. Despite all this I can say that without a doubt
I have seen an improvement in my writing throughout the semester. If I was to compare a paper I wrote in
junior year of high school with one of my papers today the improvements would be drastic(and that’s
saying a lot since I don’t consider my writing any good yet) . The main developments came from my
understanding of what I am writing and who the piece is for. Knowing when to apply different tones for
more formal spaces, and when to adjust diction is key to creating meaning and having influence with your
writing. That’s the main topic I learned from this class, and I saw it in action all the time, whether in the
correspondence packet or the memo packet. Audience influences how you write more than the subject
matter itself. I would have like to see myself writing more formal papers but I understand the constraints
of the summer course held us back.

The Assignment I am the most proud of is the correspondence packet. Not only was it my goal to have a
better email writing skill but also because it gave me insight into what kinds of emails I will eventually be
writing to my supervisors, whether it’s to my boss at work, or even professors here at uncc. The
assignment I would add would be a formatting assignment where, the student is given a scenario or text
with information about what is being written, and the student has to choose the formatting for the piece
and then it is evaluated. This is because I feel that trying to get both my words to be meaningful and
correspond with the assignment and formatting was a very difficult task and generally I would lack in one
of the departments, so it would be nice to have assignment just focusing on how to format specific papers
/ documents. Despite doing well on the virtualization packet, I found that assignment to be the most
difficult with a haptic image in a 3-D space being very difficult for me to achieve as well as unfamiliarity
with eh software holding me back. All together the class was a success and I learned several important
tasks, thank you professor.