negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation

Throughout my time in Writing for Engineers, I am now able to differentiate between different genres and their conventions. Each assignment was a different genre and the requirements for each were different as well. To better understand the rhetorical situation of each genre, the genre analysis was essential. By doing a genre analysis for lab reports we were able to contrast the guidelines with real examples to see where I should focus my attention when doing my assignment. While every genre has its guidelines the assignment itself is more than just answering the guiding questions and sometimes this extra layer can lead to us getting off track. A skill that I was able to pick up from the genre analyses was understanding the requirements of each assignment and making an outline to reflect those requirements in an efficient manner.

For the first two assignments, the memo and lab report, I neglected the differences between the two which led me to put too many persuasive elements into my lab report and too few in my memo. While persuasive elements should be present in a lab report they should be specifically kept in the introduction and abstract. From then on I have learned to be more aware of rhetorical elements in my writing and to focus on enhancing/utilizing them depending on my genre. I do understand that these rhetorical elements are the foundation on which my writing should be built, I find it difficult to incorporate them naturally. Usually it takes me another round of self-assessment to figure out what I lack and may need to add in terms of rhetorical elements. However, my ability to do so has gotten a lot better as I have been in Writing for Engineers.

In Figure 1, it shows my genre analysis of a sample technical description. By doing multiple genre analyses I was able to better understand what constitutes a good and a bad technical description. These insights helped me form a better outline than I had originally and kept me on track.