ENG 271W Instructions Write-Up Group
Within my Writing in the Sciences course during spring semester of 2019, I worked in a small group to complete a major project for the course: writing technical Instructions for a science experiment. This task sounded much easier than it proved to be. There are so many different ways to write instructions; we read examples almost every day, and depending on the use of the instructions, they can vary pretty widely in how they are written. Here, we were focused on writing instructions for a science experiment that could be done by grade school aged children, so the audience really shaped how and what we wrote.
Working in this small group to create effective pieces of writing was difficult: Who writes what portions? Will the other groups members complete their tasks? Who is going to submit our assignments? These were all questions that I was asking myself when this project was introduced, and I was placed in a group with two people of whom I had never met before. We started out by sharing what we thought our strengths and weaknesses were so that we might be able to puzzle together a 'dream team' for this project to be completed to our best abilities. I believe that this demonstrated levels 1 and 2 in the 'teams' category of leadership because I was able to share with my partners what I thought my best leadership skills were for this assignment, and then assign specific tasks/roles to each person in the group: I was to proofread all of our writing and submit assignments on time, partner B was to work on design elements for the project, and partner C was to gather the correct materials for our project. We all worked together quite well after devising this philosophy for our group, which demonstrates 'teams' level 3., We were instructed to sit down as a group and comment upon what worked and what didn't, and what we could do differently if we were to work together again on a project like that. We spoke about how we thought that communicating through a different mechanism might work better to update each other, rather than just using email, and also about how some of the work load became unequal as the project went on and how we could have re-assigned some of the tasks to other group members to more evenly distribute work.