This course, “Advanced Writing in the Disciplines”, indeed
taught me to be a functional and professional writer in my “discipline” of
study. The various assignments throughout this course were excellent in
training me to be well “disciplined” in my field of writing. The assignments such
as the Call for Papers which I responded on a Cyber Policy theme, the Code of
Ethics assignment where I wrote and planned out a Code of Ethics of my dream
company, the assignment where I wrote a sample Letter to Shareholders as if I
was a CEO of my dream company and to round it off, the Cover Letter and Resume
assignment. All these helpful assignments taught me how to write for the scholarly,
workplace, public audiences. My field of study is Business and Finance. Thus,
the audience of my type of writing ranges from clients, co-workers, brokers,
lawyers, government officials, CEO’s, managers, banks, business paper audiences
and etc. However, I learned that the context of writing changes depending on
what type of audience. For example, from my experience at co-op, when
communicating with my co-workers and my bank brokers that cover my team, I use
very informal type of writing, the one that is very short but very effective. And
this goes for all the employees and counter party brokers that I deal with. A simple
Hi and the beginning and a simple thank you is necessary but more the less,
shorter the message more effective it is. If that was how “internal” writing
comes across in my field of study, the “external” type of writing formats in
quite different way. For example, a CEO’s letter to his company’s shareholders,
a Chairman’s letter to his company’s employees, a article in a Forbes Magazine,
a letter or an email to a high level client, and etc. In cases like these, the
type of writing becomes very different. These tend to be extremely formal and
the ones that I actually encountered at my co-op, such as a Letter from the CEO
of my company to our investors, were one of the most well written and
sophisticated piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. It’s clear to me that my “discipline”
has different style of writing depending on the audience or the counterparty
and these practices were evident in my projects in this course. Another thing
that I picked up on taking this course is that, it’s extremely effective to
take this course while you are on co-op. For me, I was able to pick up so many
elements that were discussed in these assignments at my daily operation at my
job. I was able to relate so many different things that were going on at my
co-op with what I was learning in AWD class. For example, during the Workplace
Audience project, where I had to write a Code of Ethics of a company, my firm
had an annual companywide Code of Ethics conference. So I was able to pick up
many things from that real life conference and exploit that knowledge in my
writing.
I was technologically limited and thus couldn’t record a
video or anything of that nature but I believe I made it pretty clear through
my words that this class was very helpful in developing me as a professional in
business writing. I got a great combination of reading, assignments,
discussions, research, real life encounter at co-op to really soak in all the
disciplines that was present in my field. Awesome course and awesome professor.
I would and will recommend this online course to my peers. Cheers!
