Communication Portfolio

I came into ENG 2003 expecting a soft course attached to an engineering degree, and I left thinking of it as the closest thing in my second year to a design course. The reframing happened around the Axioms of Communication in Lecture 04. Axiom 8, that communication is audience-centred, is the one I keep returning to, because it converts a vague instruction to write well into a specific engineering question: who reads this, what do they already know, and what do they need to do afterwards. Once the audience is a constraint rather than a courtesy, drafting becomes something closer to specification work, and revision stops feeling arbitrary.

The course was not what I expected in a second way. I assumed the difficulty would be producing text, and it turned out to be structuring it. Term Project 1 ran across four phases, and each phase failed differently. My annotated bibliography hedged its criticism of sources. My Phase 2 draft made its argument but buried the conclusion. The final report only worked once I put the conclusion in the executive summary and made every figure earn its place in the surrounding paragraphs. None of those were sentence-level problems, which is what I had assumed writing problems were.

The most useful content was Lecture 06 on technical writing, specifically the instruction to explain things before presenting them. I had been doing the reverse: introducing Figure 1, then explaining it. Inverting that changed my report more than any other single edit, because a reader who understands why a figure exists reads it correctly the first time. The same lecture's guidance on avoiding first person and reducing ambiguous terms is what pushed my final report into a consistent formal register, addressing exactly the kind of tonal inconsistency a peer reviewer had flagged in my draft.

The most interesting topic was the rhetorical triangle, and specifically using it to evaluate other people's work rather than to plan my own. In Phase 1 I used ethos, logos, and pathos to judge four sources, and the framework made my criticism precise instead of merely polite. It also connected to Axiom 4, that communication is a principal way of establishing and maintaining credibility, in a way I had not anticipated: the reason a systematic review with a documented appraisal protocol reads as more trustworthy than an equally accurate blog post is that the protocol is itself a communicative act. Axiom 7, that communication is ambiguous, landed hardest in the recorded interview assignment, where a single take meant I could not read a room and adjust, and every ambiguity I introduced stayed in the recording.

Description. The episode I want to reflect on is the revision of Term Project 1 between Phase 2 and Phase 4. I submitted a draft, received blind peer feedback from three reviewers through PeerScholar, and rebuilt the report. Two of the three reviewers had been assigned reports on entirely different topics, a concentrated-solar-power proposal and an autonomous-vehicle sensor-fusion proposal, so parts of their commentary did not describe my document at all. The third reviewer engaged with my report directly and told me to confirm every claim was cited, verify no section had been lost on export, and adopt a more consistently formal tone.

Feelings and evaluation. My first reaction to the mismatched reviews was that the feedback was wasted, and my first reaction to the formal-tone comment was defensive, because I thought my draft already read formally. Both reactions were wrong, and noticing that they were wrong is the part I would keep. On re-reading, the draft did contain contractions and informal phrasing, and the transferable advice in the off-topic reviews, add citation numbers next to specific claims, add a diagram and a comparison table, was straightforwardly good. The feedback I resisted most turned out to be the feedback that changed the document most.

Analysis. Two axioms explain why this was harder than it should have been. Axiom 6, that communication involves interpersonal risk, describes both directions of a blind peer review. Axiom 2, that all communication involves relation as well as content, explains my defensiveness: I read a comment about tone as a comment about competence. Separating those layers is what let me write Appendix A of the final report, where I mapped each piece of feedback to a change and declined one suggestion with a reason rather than ignoring it silently.

Conclusion. What improved most is structuring a document for a reader: executive summaries that state conclusions first, figures that are introduced and interpreted, and headings that let someone navigate without reading linearly. Correctness and completeness improved too, mostly through discipline about citations. What still needs work is conciseness, which is the C I most consistently fail, and delivery under time pressure. In the recorded interview assignment I had one take, and my answers were accurate but longer than they needed to be, with the qualifications I would edit out of a document left in out loud.

Action plan. Two concrete changes. First, I will treat every first draft as over-length and cut a fixed proportion before anyone else reads it, rather than adding qualification when I feel uncertain. Second, at Appli AI I write pull request descriptions that other developers act on, so I will apply Axiom 8 to them explicitly: what does the reviewer need to approve this, and nothing else. Lecture 04 noted that between fifty and ninety per cent of a technical job is spent on communication tasks. I took that as an argument for taking the course seriously; I now take it as an argument for treating writing as part of the engineering rather than as a reporting layer bolted on afterwards.