Genre

Understanding the genre was probably the most interesting part of the class for me. I always read lab reports, memos, and instructions, but learning the elements of each and what makes each one an effective piece of writing for engineers, was really fascinating to me. Merkel helped a great ton with this, since it really went in-depth, describing each element and what it accomplishes.

Every single genre that we discussed in this class, without fail, seems to be very useful and prevalent in the engineering field. Each one has a very distinct purpose and task that it accomplishes, and knowing all of them, gives you a nice kit of useful writing tools, that are bound to help you in your career. If you want to describe an object or system in detail, you need to write a technical description. If you want to communicate research, you need to write a lab report. If you need a general request or you need to simply inform someone of something, you need to write a memo. If you need to do all of them in a large project for a specific client, then an engineering proposal is the way to go. Understanding each genre was aided by the repeated genre analysis assignments that we had to complete. Reading sample documents and analyzing them, helped me understand what worked and what didn’t. It took me out of the seat of a writer, and into the seat of the reader. Here is a snippet of a genre analysis that I wrote on a sample engineering proposal:

The one thing that I failed at when it comes to genre, was getting good practice of the job posting. I understood it in theory, but I didn’t have practice writing it. This is because the only job posting that we wrote was as a group, and the work was split in such a way that I was working on the proposal, and not the job posting. In light of this, I want to practice developing job postings, in case I need that skill in my engineering career.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.