Djamen 1

February 21, 2016

Michael Flores
Professor English 219, UNM

Dear professor,
Up to now, this English 219 class has been a compilation of multiple assignments and
activities that were all designed for us to get closer to meeting the course objectives. Project 1
was about addressing one specific issue by communicating it with and at a group or association
through a social media campaign. However, In contrast to English 110 and 120, analyzing the
rhetorical situation and composing in various modes have gotten very much demanding. Can I
pretend to have mastered all that? I truly do not think so, but I keep working towards it.
For the first project, I chose to raise awareness about the inadequate working
conditions tutors are facing within the engineering student service at UNM; this is an issue I
completely made up. The project was composed of three parts. First, there was the email, meant
to address the issue directly to the entity concerned, and then there was a response letter, written
from the entitys perspective. The second part was the creation of the social media page which
includes an open letter addressed to a broader audience in order to raise awareness. Finally, we
created a commercial video (or a brochure) which added to a poster, informs and invites the
public to a course of action. That is, all these assignments required a clear understanding of what
technical communication is.

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After the completion of this project, my understanding of technical

communication got quite changed. Originally, I thought it was any form of writing or speech
intended to convey any scientific, political, or professional idea or message, and only produced
by a qualified author. In other words, I believed it was very limited and only very restricted to so
call technical communicators. However, through readings, activities, and assignments, my
understanding of Technical communication evolved. In fact, its limits can hardly be restricted; it
is a broad field that includes any form of communication that exhibits the authors desire to
provide information to a specific audience. More importantly, this project got me to understand
that technical communication is an audience centered process allowing them to take action. As a
result, profiling and identifying my audience appeared to be primal in my creation process; first
in my email, whose audience was UNM administration and in which my tone tended to be
professional, and later in open letter, commercial video, and poster in which my audience was all
UNM students.
In contrast to what I expected, completing this project was sometimes very enjoyable, easy
and intuitive. Almost every day, through social media activities, many of us get familiar with
addressing an issue to a broad audience or with effectively drawing ones attention. Thus, taking
that experience into account, I chose a commercial video over a brochure since I believed it
would work better in persuading my audience to get involved. Also, I did not want to overwhelm
my audience or get them bored, so I decided to create a short and pretty funny story illustrating a
stickman (Michael). Moreover, instead of having a social media page just about the fake issue, I
thought it would work better if I created a UNM group website, addressing this issue publicly, so
I did it. I think that choice makes the campaign more realistic. Finally, the class activities and

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readings about website design ended up extremely helpful and essential to understand design
principles as well as visual structure strategies.
I truly believe this project is helping me towards reaching the course objectives. Indeed,
concerning the first one which was figuring out what we are communicating about, why and who
it is addressed to in order to determine the appropriate genre, almost every single aspect of this
project covered it. For instance, when choosing the commercial, I had to consider who my
audience was and what they would be more interested in; also for my email and my open letter,
clearly defining my purpose was my first priority. The second objective is to equip students with
enough understanding about gathering useful information. Concerning this objective, when
creating my poster, I had to consider all the examples of ones I got to appreciate in the past in
order to get as many students drawn as possible. The third objective is developing students
skills in choosing the right content structure, organization, and strategies that will effectively
appeal the audience. I think I have met this one when designing my website which is extremely
purpose driven and audience centered; its organization, structure, design choices and tools were
all influenced by the way I profiled an average student. The fourth objective is about editing,
providing visual enhancers and details so as to clean up documents professionally. I believe the
whole class made some substantial progress towards this objective during the peer review which
got me to clean up a few grammar mistakes and to add better visual details to my website.
Finally, the last objective is to get students able to use pictures, charts, or even videos effectively
in technical communication according to their audience and purpose. Like a few of the other
objectives, I met this one when working on each part of the project. The emails and letters where
very effective modes of communication for addressing my issue; then the poster and videos were

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useful to persuade a broader audience, and the website is just a really good way to really get
people to take action.
All that being said, when looking back at all that we already completed, I cant help but
feel pretty proud of my work and of how much effort I put through this project despite the barrier
English still represents for me as a third language. Surprisingly, I am feeling pretty excited about
whats next, still hoping to make more and more progress towards the course objectives.
Sincerely,
Loic Djamen