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Reflection Blog: Professional Writing

Hey everyone! During my time in school, I got the experience of a professional writing class and quickly learned it was not at all what I thought it would be! I wanted to share my experiences and thoughts on some of the assignments. Enjoy!

While reflecting on my assignments, I realized that the assignment that challenged me the most was my audience evaluation assignment. When I started professional writing, I had it in my head that it was going to just be about learning how to properly write in the professional workspace. What I did not expect was an assignment that frustrated me because it asked specific questions that made me reflect on hopes for my future career. The reason it challenged me and frustrated me so much was the fact that I am in a place where I don’t know “what I want to be when I grow up”. While that may sound silly at my age, I started college late in life compared to a large population. When I enrolled in college, I only knew that I wanted to earn my degree and use it with a focus on women in gaming and esports while also utilizing it to strengthen my career in content creation. I have not stopped to really think about WHAT I want to do specifically. This assignment forced me to answer questions about my clients or customers for my future career, colleagues/employees/supervisors. It wanted me to have answers on their demographics and much more. But how do you answer these questions when you don’t even know what you want to do with life after college? I was left providing answers that were considered “a good start, but some could go further because they lack detail”. That feedback was not wrong at all. It may have been a little bit of a sting, but what is feedback meant to do for us? Its purpose is to provide us with information to help take our work even further, give ideas on how to improve. I was given the opportunity to respond with an explanation that I don’t have a “dream job” and that I was currently feeling lost in what I am even doing. The follow up feedback that it may help to utilize a task like this to “think through the particulars of a path” I might be interested in but not yet committed to. It was pointed out that it could possibly help me figure out what I want to pursue which was a valid point. While I am still not sure if there is a specific job title for my vision, this assignment helped to shift my brain a little bit which only proved to help me further into the course.

Overall, I think I am the weakest in writing about what I have to offer as a professional. As a person that struggles to see themselves in a positive light, that unfortunately carries over into my professional life as well. It honestly isn’t just within writing; I have struggled during interviews as well. Going back to my audience evaluation, this was meant to clarify important aspects of who I am as a professional and what I have to offer. While I struggled with the writing because I don’t know what my “dream job” is at this point, I also acknowledge that I struggle to talk about myself as a professional as well. I think the best way to strengthen this is to revisit these questions from time to time and write new responses until I find it easy to write about myself like this. But I also think as the feedback stated, this could help me decide where my heart wants to be at the end of my journey through school.

Spicy subject alert! Ai, the thing that so many of us dislike and something that so many people utilize a lot. The question is if you are using it, are you using it correctly? In this class I learned that there are different types of Ai. There is what is called an LLM, the Large Language Model, and then there is the generative Ai. The ladder of the two being what people dislike the most. Because Ai is not going anywhere, this assignment challenged us to learn how to use an LLM correctly. A lot of people will write a prompt without the needed information then just copy and paste the response. It happens more often than one would think. This assignment utilized the prompt of a complaint letter. I had chosen my own scenario instead of one of the three provided. It was inspired by a real-life situation my own family was dealing with on something we had ordered, and it came in destroyed. I utilized ChatGPT, I started with giving the LLM the format in which this email needed to be written in along with what each individual paragraph should contain. The next part I gave it the scenario with the details of what the problem was. ChatGPT then outputs a written complaint email in the exact format I had specified at the start. I found this helpful because had I written my own complaint letter it would have been extremely wordy, not as professional, and would probably not have been an email that anyone wanted to read. It, in my opinion, set a solid professional tone, it provided good grammar and punctuation which allowed me to learn what it looks like when you correctly use the LLM Ai. While I will never support generative Ai, I could see myself utilizing an LLM if I find that I am stuck trying to write something as effective as what ChatGPT did for this assignment. This is not something that I could see myself using on a regular basis as I still do not like Ai, but I might on occasion for very particular situations.

One thing that I really enjoyed was the variety of assignments I had during my time in professional writing. While I have always been decent in my writing, this course made me step outside my writing norm and taught me that decent writing isn’t always the answer depending on the situation. While it is a good foundation, it isn’t the final answer depending on what you need to write. There will always be certain specifications of what is needed in your writing depending on what you are writing for. Two types of writings that I worked on were my professional profile and reaching out. I have never been good with writing a “bio” for myself even though I am a full-time content creator and I should have a well written profile if I expect brands to take interest in me or other creators to contact me for collaborative experience. The professional profile assignment taught me what a professional profile should look like for my platforms and now I can finally write something more professional and stronger than what I currently have. This is also something I will be able to use in the future when I finish college and set off to find a career in the professional world of the game business and esports industry. The reaching out assignment also challenged me a good bit because it helped give me an idea of where I want to head in my future. While this was meant to be a mock reaching out scenario, I was able to realize my dream for my future where I want to go after I graduate and WHY. While the main purpose of this assignment was to teach us how to write for the purpose of reaching on through specific platforms like email, LinkedIn and a method such as a social media platform, it really helped me grasp so much more than just that. I really valued this assignment as I would have been the one to reach out with the same format and length regardless of the platform I used. These writing styles will really help shape the way I move into the professional field with the way I approach each situation.