My Theory of Writing

The theory of writing is a subjective concept that varies from person to person. When I first started taking this writing for engineering class, I didn’t believe I had a particular theory or approach to writing. Even now, there are times when I question whether I have a defined theory at all. I just write whatever I think about in my head and follow the assignment’s details and requirements. In a year, my theory might change slightly or completely, if I find new strategies to write efficiently and with quality. At times, the project or paper might be due the same night, like this assignment where I have around five hours to complete it, but that extra bit of stress influences me to do my work and makes me work better in some cases.

In general, placing a time limit to do work, such as a timer or if you need to do something specific at a certain time, the extra amount of stress and pressure may influence you to work a lot better. One major problem with that however is that the quality of the paper or anything that you might do might be lesser due to it, but in general, it’s a lot better and may work with some people.

Throughout my writing process, I primarily focus on expressing whatever thoughts come to mind, often without instantly checking for spelling or grammar mistakes. This approach allows me to draft the content more rapidly compared to meticulously proofreading every sentence as I go. At times, I just look at my keyboard and just let my brain do all of the work. After I finish the paragraph that I was working on, then I go back and finish any spelling or grammar mistakes that I may have made whilst writing. This, in my opinion, improves my creativity during the writing and also helps me revise it during the writing portion. 

Before I came into this class, I just finished a creative writing class. During that class, we needed to write about whatever came into our minds and place it on a piece of paper. We had to do three assignments, a poem, a fictional piece, and a non-fiction piece. You would receive an A+ in the class if you did all the assignments correctly and participated in the class. Although it was a very fun class, some aspects of that class won’t help me at all with engineering, other than the creativity aspect of writing. Both writing for engineering and creative writing classes has their pros and cons, I personally feel like it’s best to incorporate both of them, due to engineering having a major creative aspect to it, and incorporating the creativity into a professional proposal or rhetorical paper will be useful to have a special touch added to your paper. 

One thing that was extremely different compared to every other writing class that I[‘ve ever taken, other than creative writing, was the fact that there weren’t any rough draft submissions. In creative writing, we were graded by completion of the task, so if you did it correctly you would’ve gotten an A+ anyways. In this writing for engineering class, although there were peer reviews, we basically needed to do things perfectly the first time, or else our grades will hinder. Personally, the peer reviews weren’t as helpful compared to a professor giving us feedback, because if a student doesn’t know the topic at hand, they wouldn’t be too much of a help. They might give too little or false information and might cause the recipient of the feedback to have a false sense of security, thinking that the writing is ok, only to receive a bad grade. I’ve gone through this, and it has also promoted procrastination because I felt that the peer reviews did more harm than good, so instead I did the minimum work required to pass the peer reviews, and then finish all of the work in one shot on the day that it’s due. I needed to come up with strategies to make this work, and it didn’t work most of the time. I kept on making mistakes in my writing, and couldn’t fix it afterward. One positive thing about this is that it’s similar to real life. You will only have one shot to do it.

This class very much prepared me for real-life engineering writing. With all of the feedback that I’ve received from the professor, I can use it to improve my writing if I’ll ever use it in the future. I thought this class was going to be extremely challenging, but although it was indeed challenging, it also had a creativity aspect that is getting rarer and rarer by the day. The availability to choose your own topic to write about was quite nice, especially if you had an engineering topic that you wanted more people to be aware of. I know with this class, I came out a better writer for engineering.