Product Review Self Reflection 

For this assignment we needed to choose an item from our household and review it. This was quite interesting to do because I’ve never written a paper like this so it was fun. The product I chose to review was the Roomba 694 Robot Vacuum. There was lots of research to do for this product which I had to learn about even about terms I didn’t know. I also needed to learn how this robot vacuum functions because most of the time I just turn on this product and let it do it’s job, which is what most of us do. After reading back my paper I noticed that it isn’t that good of a product review essay. 

 

It took me til the end of writing this paper that I should have chosen a product that I could look into easily without it being complicated. I learned that I have to get more descriptive, I kept most of my sentences short which wasn’t good. Also organizing the way I layout my paper would have made my topic more interesting. All I have is two short body paragraphs which I think isn’t enough information. And looking back at my introduction I don’t see why I would add a lot of descriptive details about the roomba instead of just introducing the product and giving  a brief summary about it. While reviewing my draft I got feedback that I wasn’t specific enough on which product I’ll be reviewing since all I had said was a roomba robot which doesn’t help the reader understand since there are many versions of roomba robot. Turns out I didn’t really know how the product I chose actually works so I had to watch many videos on youtube and read the manual to understand more. This brings me to my point of researching which is a crucial part to my writing. So researching is a thing I learned from this assignment which I have never done. 

 

Once you understand what you are writing about it makes it easier for me to know what I should write about. Instead of creating long sentences to make my writing longer. I still have to learn to stop repeating many words and I need to expand my vocabulary. Looking back at my writing I see that I could have used better words to compare products. My use of words were just simple. I think that for future assignments I need to give myself more time to work on it. Meaning I need to start my assignments earlier so that I can actually have a clear understanding of what I’m doing. Also I need to fix my format of papers because what I have isn’t correct. While having so many things I need to still work on I think that at the end I just need to step back and look at it again. Writing down all my ideas would help me write the paper instead of having so many thoughts in my mind because I will eventually forget about them.  

Technical Description Memo

The technical description paper was the one of the papers I learned a lot from. For this assignment we need to write a technical description of a product of our choice and show a visual representation of it. While doing that I need to have influence on the reader about my product. Having to look for a product that I would be giving a very detailed description was pretty tough. Before finally choosing to write about the Nostalgia Mini waffle maker I was breaking apart every possible item I could write about. But ended up choosing what seemed more interesting to me. Since there was so much to this I wrote an outline breaking down all the parts of the Nostalgia Mini waffle maker because I didn’t know where to start. The hard part for me was deciding what pieces were parts and subparts. I was breaking apart the waffle maker which was the most fun part for me, learning how everything that is hidden works together. Something that really helped me was deciding by parts I’ll be writing about such as the plastic cover, aluminum plates, and wire connection.

 

My first mistake with this paper was not being organized. I didn’t have a problem with getting all my information, I just didn’t know how to move on from there. After having everything sectioned I gathered all my research and information and put them with each section. It took me some hours because I would look at what I had in front of me from breaking it apart and then I would search up what I was looking at because I didn’t know the names of any of the subparts of the waffle maker or how they functioned. I also had to be very careful with what waffle makers I was reading online about because so many of these waffle makers are built differently so description of images of many waffle makers I looked at were quite different from each other. 

 

After being able to gather all my information for the product I was able to form a paper. At first I wasn’t sure how this paper was supposed to look like so I looked at examples online and I even asked a classmate to see how their paper looks to get an idea. That really helped me think about how I would build my paper. Writing the introduction wasn’t that hard for me but I did have some incorrect grammar that I needed to fix, since all I needed was history of the waffle maker and introducing the product. I needed to write something that will hopefully make the reader want to continue reading about. And the same thing goes for the conclusion which sums up everything and closes everything explaining what this product is and why they should consider getting it. I did notice that at first I was having trouble with not including “I”, because that wasn’t allowed so while checking for that it helped me read the paper again to see anything that needs to be edited. What I take from all of this is that I need to be sure to have read the instructions for this assignment and to not overwhelm myself.

 

In conclusion I would say this made the most impact in my writing. I definitely learned how to from my paper in APA style. Also something I got from it was reading out loud whenever I was writing because it helped me clear my mind and focus more on what I was writing. And  I learned more about the different features in google docs. I was having trouble with adding images for my visual representation part of the paper because some of my images need to have a diagram to describe the subparts I would be writing about. I learned to just write whatever came to mind and to not focus on the amount of words I had on paper because that will just hold me back. Even though I still have more to learn to better my writing I believe it has improved over the period of completing the technical description assignment compared to when I first started.