Memorandum
To: Missy Watson
From: Raisa Tahsin
Date: May 2nd, 2019
Subject: Mock Lab Report
Summary:
The primary objective of the Phase three mock lab report was to study the organizational patterns, moves, steps, audiences, purposes, and larger contexts of engineering genres. Then build on new insights and gain practice with writing collaborative reports. Collaboration is big in the field of engineering and the purpose of the essay was to make us more comfortable working in groups to write a report and then present it to the class. Furthermore, the essay serves to make us well versed in all thing’s lab report since the main kind of writing engineers do are lab reports. My goal for this essay was to learn how to better collaborate, become comfortable with engineering writing and lab reports.
Methods:
Firstly, Ryan, Ricardo, Bethanie and I had to choose a topic for our mock lab report. We wanted to pick something ridiculous but also a topic we could incorporate engineering and science into. We decided on “Analysis of Uno as a Predictor and Assessor of Interpersonal Relationships Acquired from Polygraph Test and Cranial Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).” For the lab report portion of this Phase I was responsible for the introduction to the methods section, the predictor and fMRI scan portion of the methods section, making a graph, table, equation and a discussion for the graph I made. When writing the method section, I first created an outline since there were multiple parts to our experiment. One of the things I had to keep checking was if my writing was flowing with the rest of the paper. Since this was a group project, there were so many writing styles and many times one section was split into multiple parts written by different people so I would have to go back and read to see if what I wrote aligns with what my group member wrote and if I should include something or take something out if it was repetitive. Doing the lab report in parts was helpful for me and as a group because I was aware of what my role was, what I needed to do, add or fix and in terms of the entire group it was helpful because we were able to present all our ideas and decide which ones to keep, change or not use and this helped us see what our goal for our lab report was and how we were working towards that goal.
In the presentation, we all created slides for our respective parts in the lab report. When creating the presentation, I focused on having the most important information on each slide and I planned to go in depth during the presentation while speaking. Our group all agreed that we wanted less text, more visuals and to try and make our presentation as engaging as possible. When creating the power point, I tried to have less text and inserted pictures in place of text to make the presentation more visually appealing and engaging. One method I have for presentations is creating a script beforehand and rehearsing so I’m not nervous while speaking and so I have a general gist of the things I want to highlight in the presentation.
Results:
Overall, this assignment taught me more about writing as an engineer and how to collaborate on such a large and multifaceted project. I was able to “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes” and “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” Since the content of the lab report was fictional, I was really able to focus more on how I wrote the lab report, pay attention to stylistic choices and attempt to mirror common engineering writing techniques in my own writing for practice. This essay required a lot more revision and editing compared to the other two essays since this was a group project, we had to change our report to a presentation and writing a lab report in general requires multiple revisions. Combining fictional content and a conventional format taught me a lot about what a lab report actually does, how engineers write and the purpose of each individual section. I got a better understanding of the IMRD format and I realized how important formatting and language is because in this project we were able to take a fictional topic and make it seem reasonable in some ways just through adding engineering language and following the conventional IMRD format of lab reports.
Conclusions/Recommendations:
Ultimately, my biggest takeaways from this project was how to collaboratively work with others on such a large task, how to format a proper lab report and then make it into a presentation. This project made me more aware of how to integrate different ideas, being academically compromising and combining different ideas to make a coherent theme. A suggestion I have for myself is to try see if I can utilize more engineering language which will help more in the future. Also, to make sure each section is written in the correct tense, this was something I made mistakes on when writing the group lab report and I want to work on that and remain consistent with the tense. Of course, this was a made-up topic but in a real lab report the discussion would require much deeper analysis and this gave me an idea for the methods, techniques and skill I will require in the future in my career as an engineer.
