English 3050: Technical Communication

To: Rachel Dortin

From: Mikayla Scott
Date: 14 December 2018
Subject: Performance Review Memo

Introduction:

This memo serves as a performance review for my overall progress from the beginning of English 3050 to
the conclusion of the course. Throughout this document I will go over in detail different projects and my
contributions to them, both individual and collaborative, to show my growth in this course. To support
these different contributions, I will show examples from documents that I have composed over the
semester. In addition to the contributions I put forth this semester I will also argue whether or not I met
the learning outcomes for this semester. I will also address some lessons, and strategies that I will take
away from this class to improve my future writings, and collaborative experiences.

As I mentioned before I will talk about the learning outcomes of this class. There are 4 different outcomes
that I was supposed to strengthen over the semester through different projects and assignments. The first
is writing and designing, this is an outcome that was implemented in every project. It has to do with how
the document looks, and how the writing on the document is written, for example the format. The next
learning outcome is reading and analyzing. We completed this learning outcome through the semester by
completing reading responses. The reading responses required that we read Markel and then interpret the
information that he was giving us, to apply it to our writing. The learning outcome researching and
documentation was heavily used in project 3c when it came time to doing research on the food desert
crisis in Detroit. Last, the using technology and media, a learning outcome that was used in every
assignment that we had, mostly because this is an online class. Throughout this memo you will see me go
into depth into each one of these categories.

Performance Review:

Writing and Designing

I want to start off by first addressing my individual performance when it came to writing and designing in
this class throughout the semester. I believe that I grew in this category throughout all 3 projects, however
I am going to heavily focus on project 1 and 2 because those are projects that I completed by myself. You
will find more about project 3 in the collaborative performance section to follow. In project 1 the resume
and cover letter, at first, I struggled with the design aspect of this. I was once told that your resume should
not come across as busy, when it came to design. My first draft of the resume was very bland. Little color,
and no different fonts or anything to grab your eye. Through the feedback I got, I realized that it is
important to have something that will set your resume apart from the others in the pile. In the end my
resume ended up having touches of yellow here and there, as well as three different fonts that worked
together to grab someone’s eye. The writing in this class compared to in other classes was different than
any other English class I had taken. In project 2 we had to create instruction sets and post them to
Wikihow. Writing instructions is something that I never really thought was that hard, until I had to do it. I
learned that in order to be successful in writing instructions, the steps can not be terribly long, and you
need to use jargon that everyone is going to understand. At first this is something that I didn’t realize, I
learned to realize that this was essential for me especially because I chose a topic that was very technical.
Eventually with the help of the Wiki community I was able to divide my steps into sub-steps and insert
images to help aid in the process. In this class I feel that I have individually grown in this specific
learning objective because I updated some information that I already had, as well as added some new
writing styles to my repertoire.

Now I am going to address the growth in the writing and designing category through the collaborative
process. I feel that in project 3 this learning outcome was more heavily focused on the writing element,
because it was a lot of writing from start to finish. Our group got off to a rocky start with project 3a, I
believe it was because we didn’t have a clear path of where we were going. Through feedback and
multiple different drafts, we were able to adjust our writing to create a clear proposal for out audience to
look at. The design learning outcome came more into play into project 3c for the recommendation report.
At first, we decided that it would be beneficial for us to insert all the data results into the document as
graphs. After getting feedback we realized that that was a little bit over kill. So we took out the graphs
with the exception of one, and created an appendix section of the paper. The appendix offered readers a
chance to go and refer to the graphs if they wanted to, as well as see why we asked the questions that we
asked. The appendix served as a clear place for us to store our data without overwhelming the readers. As
a result of that feedback I took away that the overall appearance of the document can have an impact on
the reader and how they perceive the document.

Reading and Analyzing

Reading and analyzing was done on an individual basis every week through reading responses. The
reading responses served as a way for us to analyze and read about a document that we were about to
write in the upcoming weeks. This process was especially helpful to me because a lot of the times Markel
provided an example of the document that we were going to write, and in the margins, he wrote notes,
which often times had tips and tricks for students such as myself. If the reading responses didn’t ask us to
reflect on Markel, then we were analyzing different documents that had been submitted by students in the
past. This was especially helpful after reading Markel because we could then decide for ourselves if there
was something that should have been done differently in the example, or if they followed the guidelines
of Markel perfectly. The reading responses changed my approach to projects because I already had a clear
vision of what the document was supposed to be like, and how I was going to approach it.

As a group reading and analyzing was done a lot in the final component of project 3c. We started our
document by following the same format as reference that we had looked at earlier in the semester. We
quickly realized after our draft that we were not following the same guidelines that were presented to us
in Markel, in the first half of the project. In result we ended up having to change the format of the whole
document, and even having to rewrite some of the components to make them fit better to Markel. Reading
and analyzing did help us turn this project around quickly when we needed it the most. Before referring to
Markel we found that we were getting lost in our own writing, and our document when looking at it
coherently, didn’t make sense. After referring to the textbook and looking at his sample document we
were able to adjust and fix most of the problems that we were having with the document, and because of
that I say that we improved as a group in this document overall.

Researching and Documenting

Individually in projects one and two there wasn’t that much research that needed to be done because it
was mostly recalling off information that I already knew. I did more documentation on my own in project
2. I had to carefully document each one of the steps of the procedure, this included making sure every
picture lined up where it was supposed to go in the instruction set. I learned the hard way that every
picture had to be named something specific when importing them into Wikihow. This is where I learned
the importance of correct documentation, it took a lot of time to go back and rename all those photos and
upload them again. In project 2 I wish I would have done some more research on possible topics to write
the instruction set on. I would compose an instruction set on a topic that has a few less steps and prior
knowledge needed. Where my project turned out ok, I think that it would still be hard for the average
person to pick up and complete.
Researching and Documentation was a majority of project 3, I chose to write about it in the collaborative
performance because we came up with different components of the project to research and then split it the
topics from there. I was responsible for the research done through scholarly text. We decided as a group
that the research through text was important because it gave us insight to experiments that had already
been completed, and the results that the researchers concluded from the study. In addition to text we also
researched, maps, different programs implemented around Detroit, and conducted a study of our own.
Throughout this project I think that research is something that we all improved upon, because it is
something that we did repeatedly to look at the relationship between our findings. I think that it is also
important to take note of the study that we created because of the research that we did. We noticed that
there were some differences in the times that the articles were written so we were interested if some of the
same things that were influencing the food desert crisis seven years ago, were still influencing Detroit
today. We created a survey and then compared the results to those of the scholarly articles, and how they
fit in with the maps that we had also researched. From there we were able to draw conclusions and make
suggestions of our own.

Using Technology and Media

I used technology in every project that this class had to offer. This was an online class so using
technology and media was necessary for us to succeed this semester. The project that I feel like I grew the
most in through technology was project 1c when we created out own websites. Before making my own
online resume, I had worked to create stuff similar but never to this magnitude. I chose to use Wordpress,
a site that I wasn’t familiar with in order to broaden my horizons. Throughout the project, I received
feedback on the drafts that I submitted and then changed my site accordingly. These critiques helped me
to make my site the best that it could be, and because of that I believe my learning outcome of the use of
technology and media was strengthened throughout the course.

As a group for project 3c we chose to use google as a word processor so that all of us could work on the
project at the same. I am used to using Microsoft office for most of the projects and assignments that I
complete. For me using google was something I wasn’t quite as familiar with, but as the project went on I
became more and more proficient in utilizing all the different features that it had to offer. For example, I
wrote and published the survey that allowed us to conduct our own research on the food desert crisis in
Detroit. We used to google forms to do this, had we not used google it may have been more difficult to
gather the results of the survey and import them into our document. Google took the survey results and
put them into a spread sheet and even made them into pie graphs that we could just import into the
document. I think that overall the group had a great success with using google as a word processor
amongst other things.

Conclusion:

I believe that I have met the learning requirements individually because in multiple assignments, and
projects throughout the semester I have shown improvements in writing, designing, reading, analyzing,
researching and documenting. As an individual there has been multiple decisions that I made as a writer,
resulting in feedback that made me change the way I looked at a certain piece of writing. From there I
changed and adapted to these critiques to make my writing stronger. These same critiques will help me
for future writings, as they advise me what is beneficial for writing and what isn’t. I feel that
collaboratively we as a group have grown, and because of that I have grown as well. At the beginning of
the semester there were somethings that I was unfamiliar with, and throughout the semester I became
accustom to them, like using google instead of Microsoft. These different examples coming out of project
3 show what we tackled as a group, it serves as proof that all of us have exceeded well over the expected
outcomes on multiple occasions.
From this class I will take away two major lessons that will help contribute to future endeavors. The first
is how to research, interpret data, and then turn it into something that we can build on. This semester a
majority of project 3 was researching, so that we could help contribute to a solution to a problem. We
were essentially adding to the discussion of the food desert crisis in Detroit. Through research we were
able to become armature experts on the topic, so that we could work to create a solution. That being said
the thing that I will take away from this class is the ability to do proper research, using reliable sources,
creating studies of my own and then interpreting that data for the world to understand. The second thing
that I will take away from this class is how to effectively work in a group. Like said before a majority of
this class was taken by project 3. We spent almost a half of a semester with the same group of people,
working to create 3 different, but coherent documents. Communication was definitely something that we
struggled with in the beginning, but as time went on and we got more comfortable with each other it
became easier and easier. To sum it all up, communication is key to an effective work environment.