The Final Self-Assessment

It has been nearly two months since I wrote the first assessment. During these two months, I have realized that my writing has become even better and I learned new things about technical communication. The first assignment we had after the first self-assessment was the exercises number 4 and 5 from page 145. In this assignment, we were asked to re-write the given questions and statements. I found this assignment very helpful because sometimes I tend to ask vague questions instead of being more specific.

Next assignment we had was to create interview questions. I worked with my peer group to do this assignment. The most important thing in this assignment was paying attention to the close-ended questions. With the knowledge that we gained from the previous assignment about the close-ended questions, we were able to write better interview questions for Leonardo DiCaprio. Doing an interview with someone requires a background information about him. For example, if you will interview a person for a job, you would not want to ask a question that is already on his resume. Moreover, this is exactly what I learned from this assignment; not asking vague and close-ended questions.

Evaluating a website was one of my favorite assignments. Before doing this assignment, I did not paid so much attention to City College’s website. Most of the time, I was only searching the information that I needed to find on the website, I did not care so much about its design as long as it had the information I wanted. This assignment helped me to pay attention to the website in terms of its design and navigation. If I were asked to evaluate another website, I would evaluate it better than I did with CCNY’s website.

Fracking assignment was one of the most challenging assignments we had after the first-assessment. What made it so challenging was to coming up three statements that you would be able to turn into visual graphics. I picked three statements and explained how I can make graphs out of them. However, later on when I was trying to gather information to make visuals, I could not find so much information about one of the statements I wrote and because of this, I had to come up with a different statement. For two of the other statements, I drew a process of fracking and colored the map of U.S. based on the states that allows fracking. This assignment is important because it helped me with the next assignment, which was to create visuals for our research topic.

Another fun assignment we had was to write a business correspondence just like complaint and adjustment letters. I did not really know how to write a business letter when I was doing this assignment, and then I read the pages about it on Markel and it helped me understand the assignment a lot better. This is an important assignment because it is actually very likely to write such letter in the near future. With the help of this assignment, I would definitely be able to write a better one in the future.

The last assignment that we had was to write an analytical paper about our websites’ statistics. This was a fun, interesting and easy assignment. It was really interesting and exciting to see how many people were on my website on daily basis. Another interesting thing was to see the statistics based on operating systems and browsers.

Lastly, I would like to talk about peer groups. We had these assigned groups since the beginning of the semester. Having your classmates’ contact number or email from is an important thing because most of time I had to ask questions to my group member about assignments. In addition, when I was doing some of the assignments, I contacted my group member to get his opinion about my writing. I think a group member is not only someone that helps you to understand assignment better, but also someone that can influence and make your writing better by stating his constructive criticism on your work. Therefore, it is always better to have someone else’s opinion besides your own.