Terminal Velocity Lab Report Reflection

Md Foysal, Amrit, Asma, Anika, Yifang

Professor Maryam Alikhani

Writing for Engineering ENGL 21007-E

March 13, 2018

Reflection

This was not my first time doing a collaborative lab report, so I had some experience

beforehand which assisted me during the writing process of our lab. Amongst the numerous course goals, there were some that were used more than others. We applied the goal: “strengthen your source use practices”, when writing the background research of our project. We didn’t want to get too deep into the physics of the project so we just scratched the surface in order to not confuse the reader with a plethora of unrelated terms. We also applied the goal: “engage in general analysis and multimodal…” when writing the bulk of the lab report. Writing the results and conclusion took a lot of analysis since we had to analyze the data we got from the experiment, as well as that, the research took analysis and formulating the whole experiment itself too. And the most important goal in my opinion was “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic…”, because this goal allowed us to partition the work more effectively. We all had different strengths and preferences, for example, I like working with data and numbers so I did the majority of the graphing and calculating while Amrit preferred analyzing said data to draw conclusions from them, etc.

As I have mentioned earlier, I did have experience writing lab reports so this allowed me

to review past lab reports and to see how I constructed them. Lab reports have a tendency to stay emotionless and very rigid unlike creative writing. There were some challenges at  first but we overcame them. One such challenge was procrastination, we held off a lot of work for last minute but in the end we all took initiative and pitched in our parts at our own pace. Another challenge was who would do what, we resolved this by telling each other our preferences and strengths and with that information strategically split up the group work. What I learned about my own writing was that I prefer writing more factually than emotionally. I am not good at expressing myself through words, so it was hard to contribute to the writing aspect of the project, that is why I did most of the calculations and graphing. I didn’t learn too much from collaborative writing that I didn’t know already. We all were different and did the roles we were good at. I personally enjoy group projects like this because it takes a lot of workload off of the students since the work is split up. My role in the project was data and calculation, Amrit’s was abstract, introduction and conclusion, Asma’s was procedure and materials, Yifang’s was materials and pictures, and Anika’s was references and table of contents. In the end, the members that had the smallest roles(materials and pictures) such as Yifang’s contributed to the writing of much greater parts of the lab such as Amrit’s part(abstract, introduction and conclusion). We all chipped in to each other’s sections to double-check the information and help lessen the workload.  Overall, I think the project was a success and we did a great job collaborating, and are ready to tackle future group projects.