#1 Researching/Writing Goals and Aspirations

This semester, I'd like to hone my skills in researching and writing and use these new-and-improved skills to my advantage in the professional setting. I've learned this semester that writing as if you were trying to draft a story for a novel is something entirely different from professional writing for, say, a scholarly article that will be under review by your peers. I feel pretty comfortable writing in the former style, but I have a lot of room to improve in the latter writing style.

A very large part of engineering work is documentation: recording anything and everything, marking down any obscure little detail and whatever else have you. In this way, if a client or a boss comes back to you and asks you about some mistake here or there, you can reference your notes or state that the mistake was properly recorded. I know that in my professional career as an engineer I will have to carefully document every bit of progress that is made, so I really want to improve my skills in this area. And like I stated before, this kind of writing is entirely different than writing a story about how, for example, two brothers find a pot of gold in an abandoned cabin in the woods and go to Las Vegas with it and use the actual gold pieces, not cash, for all of their purchases. For example.

I expect that as we progress further in this course, my writing skills will improve markedly. In the typical engineering curriculum I don't get to write that much, or use that side of my brain at all, so I enjoy the opportunity to write.