Critical Reflection

 At the start of the semester, my goals were to improve my writing and to overcome my fear of speaking in front of people.

Under Professor Blackstone’s guidance, I have seen improvement in my writing especially for my formal writing and technical report. I learnt that words like “I” and “we” should not appear when writing a report and that a report should be written purely in a third person point of view instead. I also learnt to paraphrase sentences and how to use APA citation to cite the sources where I got the information I needed for my report to avoid plagiarism. Nevertheless, I feel that my language still has much to improve as I am still making mistakes and language is the most important part of a piece of writing. To improve my language, I need to cultivate a habit of reading regularly since improvement in language is made over a period of time and not overnight.

Although I have made some progress through the 13 weeks of lesson, I feel that I am quite a distance away from overcoming my fear of speaking in front of many people. When class first started, I was very scared of speaking and I dreaded going to class. There were many activities in class where I had to partner with another classmate for discussion which was daunting for me. However, I got more comfortable talking to my classmates after a while as they are very friendly and I started to enjoy the class.  To improve my public speaking skills, I have to be more confident in myself and practice more before giving a presentation. I also need to stop the constant worry of making a fool of myself when speaking in front of people and realise that it is alright to make mistakes since nobody is perfect.

For team project, I learnt that effective communication is important to ensure a smooth flow and to do our work well. My team wanted to propose for a smart range initially but upon doing more research, we found out that there were products in the market that had features similar to our ideas and it is difficult for us to improve on the existing products. This issue was brought out during our team meeting and after discussion, we decided to propose an energy efficient electrical cooking range instead. Changing our idea also meant that we have to redo our technical report all over again within a shorter period of time. Luckily, my teammates had a strong sense of responsibility where everyone contributed by doing their part of the project without any reminder from the rest of the team.

For presentation, I used to speak very fast when I was presenting as I felt very nervous and I could not control myself. I have learnt to speak slower now so that I can articulate my words clearly and the audience will have an easier time listening to what I said. I also learnt techniques such as asking the audience questions to make my presentation engaging. However, I still have to work on projecting my voice further for people sitting further away from me to hear what I am saying. I am sure that I will be able to achieve this through more practice. 

In conclusion, I found this module very useful as I learnt many things that can be applied to my studies and even to my job after I graduate from university in the future. I would like to thank Professor Blackstone for your guidance and the valuable knowledge that you had taught me. Your lessons are fun and I enjoyed them very much. I would also like to thank my teammates from WYNS for the great teamwork exhibited and for being such awesome teammates.