Surprisingly, Not Completely Awful

The fact that AWD is a required course among all disciplines, along with all the horror stories I have heard about the class, I was surprised at how useful the class actually was. As a mechanical engineer, I tend to ignore writing long, fluffy sentences whenever I can. This course, however, was tailored to each specific major, and I found myself writing and evaluating the exact technical styles that I am used to seeing in my field.

We started off the year talking about Thin-Slicing. This might have been my favorite topic of conversation. The article that we read was surprisingly entertaining, and easy to read and follow along. It touched on a lot of ideas about small samples of information being able to tell a larger, yet still accurate picture.  Even after only 15 minutes of talking with a couple, the length of their relationship could be determined with a large degree of accuracy. While I am slightly, ethically uncomfortable with determining the length of someone’s relationship based on a 15-minute window (maybe I’m a hopeless romantic), I can’t argue with the numbers. I also found the thought that we thin-slice subconsciously extraordinary. Simple decisions are made by our brains based off of tiny bits of information we have collected, without us ever being aware of it! But, continuing on with the writing, I was surprised at how much information and data I was able to determine about the engineering discourse community from solely 24 years of journal article titles. I felt that starting with Thin-Slicing was the perfect way to introduce the type of writing we would accomplish in this class.

Not only did we write about items within each of our specific discourse communities, we had to branch out and learn about other discourse communities as well. The Scholarly Audience assignment had us thinking outside our own discourse community, and forced us to combine two normally separate fields into one idea. Once our ideas were combined, they had to be trimmed down, and each word had to be carefully selected to prove our document’s worth. Proposals, like the ones created for this class, are actually used to evaluate papers worthy of being shown at conferences. I felt like I was actually writing something that was important, something that I may actually use in my future.

Now, I did not have some type of grand epiphany about my field or do a major overhaul of my way of writing, but I did pick up a few skills that I will take with me moving forward. It is crucial to keep your audience in mind when writing anything. Your audience decides the tone of your paper, the language used throughout your writing, and the overall purpose of the writing. I learned what types of vocabulary and structure are to be used when dealing within, as well as outside my discourse community.

Oh, and I loved how we close read song lyrics. I’ve been a huge music enthusiast for a long time, and I constantly look up song lyrics. Just a little side note.