Dear incoming students, 

Writing for Engineers was not exactly what I expected it to be. At first, I thought it was going to be just like any other english course with engineering terms. But it wasn’t. Once I read the syllabus I said to myself “what are these assignments? Why do we need to write a memo, lab report, technical description, engineering proposal?” I realized that this wasn’t just any english course, it was going to actually help us in the future and our path as engineers. 

This course was definitely different from any other class I have ever taken. It was truly meant to prepare me for my future as an engineer. Out of all my courses this was the hardest. There was a lot of writing and assignments to be done. Whether it was asynchronous work, class work, genre analysis, actual assignments, or peer reviews we always had something to do. Although there was a lot of work, most of the work was started as a group and finished individually. I’m glad I was required to take this course because I learned alot from working on all these assignments. 

Some things I took away from the course were how important: your audience, purpose, genre, exigence, media, and stance are. These were the six rhetorical elements. For example, while we would work on our assignments Professor Carr reminded us that we should think about who the audience is. While Professor Carr was reading our work she wasn’t our actual audience, she was a secondary audience. For our first assignment, the memo, that meant figuring out who could best address our problem at CCNY and doing research to understand their qualifications and to see if they could really help us. This was the first thing we learned by writing a memo. To learn about our audience Professor Carr had us do an audience analysis, for all of our major assignments we were required to find out who the audience was and do research on them. All of the rhetorical elements helped me when I was working on my assignments. They can each be seen under the “rhetorical elements” menu at the top of the screen.

Along with the rhetorical elements the Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) also helped me with my writing. It showed me how I was improving and what I needed to improve. The CLOs included things like drafting process, collaboration, multimodal approaches, research and citations. All of the course learning outcomes and how I met each one can be found under the course learning outcomes menu at the top of the screen. I also included all of my revised major assignments (memo, technical description, lab report, and engineering proposal.)

You may come across times where you feel like it’s too much work and want to give up, or get stressed out. But trust me, at the end, it will all be worth it. Everything you learn in this course will be used in your engineering career. 

Best, 

Juan Antonio Tlatelpa

Class of 2024