Language is what made humanity advance more than any other creature that has ever lived on planet earth. As humanity advanced from small villages into cities, writing advanced as well, the first cuneiform was created in Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq. For me, writing is in my blood, as a modern-day Iraqi, I am proud to be reading, writing frequently, and always expanding my knowledge on how to be better. This is where taking this class “Writing for Engineers”, helped me develop my writing skills from moderate to advanced. One important lesson from taking this class is how to captivate on putting more emotions on a technical writing piece, instead of being bland and just logical boring math. There are also many other factors to consider in writing a technical piece of paper and this will be mentioned throughout this paper on my theory of writing.
Having a paper organized is one of the best ways to improve any writing, organization can take a paper from a five out of ten to a nine. A particular favorite of mine is chronological order which flows a paper like a history textbook. There are also other forms of organization such as to cause and effect, comparing and contrast, problem to solution. An expert writer utilizes his style into a type of organization to make his piece a cleverer thought-out paper or story. The organization makes the rhythm sound better in writing and also creates a smooth flow with transitions making your audience’s eyes happy. Speaking of audience, an expert writer knows who his audience is is and writes in relation to please the audience.
Knowing the audience is also very important to the theory of writing since it creates different styles for different people. The expression wrong time and place can also be used in writing, such as putting a slang word in a professional writing piece. Imagine writing a letter to a CEO of a corporation and having major grammar errors, nobody will take the letter seriously. The whole point of writing is for someone to read it, whether it is to yourself, spouse, family, friends, coworkers, professors, students. Choosing the appropriate words is extremely necessary when considering the audience. For this paper, my audience is my professor, a very intelligent woman, who will tackle me on any grammar mistake and will vomit on any bad transition I do. She is of course the head chef of the grammar police, “but laws are meant to be enforced because if they are not then they have no meaning at all” (Hussian Mohammed 2021).
Personally, throughout this semester I have tremendously evolved in my writing and became a much mature writer. One of my major weaknesses was citing my sources in the appropriate matter. My confusion at the start of the semester of using the APA format was my downfall. I did not really understand how to do it, but through practices from each essay, it finally hit me on how to do it. Hussian Mohammed is more of a free writer so to add on and collide with other writers is a major challenge for me. Writing about how my thoughts and how their thoughts collide, the similarities in everything and differences, and on top of all of that maintain a common theme was very difficult. Then it hit me instead of just free-flow writing, first brainstorm a theme and work with that, then relate everything to the theme of my paper, my critical thinking, and others. With that realization, my writing became more like a smart mature future engineer than I ever was.
The theory of writing has rules and its own set of laws that we must follow in order to improve our writings to be the very best and top quality. To end everything off, in order for any person to improve on writing one important factor has to always come in place. That is being curious and having a passion for what you will be writing about. If the individual is not passionate or not interested, it will show in the writing and it will not ever be the best piece that they could have written. Writing for Engineers showed me that writing is goddamn difficult, and it can take hours to even come up with a couple of sentences. However, it is the passion and the excitement to see what you can come up with that truly pushes through. Following the theory of writing rules and laws help us become much better writers. Thank you, Professor, for having me in this class!!