The fourth writing assignment we were assigned was a technical description. For this I chose a camshaft, more specifically a multi-lobe camshaft from a K24a2 Honda engine. I first started my research by checking multiply library resources, while the concept of the camshaft is thousands of years old finding general information on Hondas particular design was difficult. After our peer review I was able to divide and conquer by finding some articles with general info to tie in Hondas more recent advances.  While Wikipedia is not always a good resource, for this assignment it provided me with compiled information on the subject. I used it to get to the up to date information on where the industry is technologically present.

I next began my self-assessment, I read over my own technical description after reading my peers technical description and noticed their essays followed this format closer than I did. I had initially attempted to design something less lengthy and more concise, but this was not the goal of the assignment.  So as in my letter to the college president I started completely over, only a few sentences and the pictures made the transition to the new essay.  I also started this new Word document as an APA paper making it much easier to format. Word does not handle images well if you try to bounce back and forth between writing and placing images, the formatting of your writing jumps around sporadically. To alleviate this issue I wrote my entire essay with no images while marking the places I wanted to use the picture for a description, once my writing was completed I inserted all my images and corrected my formatting.  Microsoft Word though is a far more powerful writing tool than when I first learned how to use it, this becomes clearer with each assignment.

My final draft has almost everything I missed in my first draft, I need to polish the images and their references in the text. After reading over my final draft I think it is a better version of the assignment, but I will need to incorporate my formatting from my first draft to have properly achieved all the goals of this writing assignment.   This particular assignment has been a great achievement in my understanding of advanced engine theory and taking my knowledge and being able to express it in a professional manner.  A fundamental part of writing a technical description that I missed repeatedly until writing my final draft was how to build up to more complex descriptions that involve many simultaneous things happening. I often was trying to explain on component with another component I had yet to explain, or I would explain something in a way which would require explanation of yet even another part not mentioned in my technical description. This was very time consuming, it required reading my essay from the beginning frequently to be sure I had given the proper information in the correct order for the reader to comprehend.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.