As my first major assignment for this class, the Lab Report Analysis was definitely an overwhelming experience. What made this assignment so tedious was the fact that there were many components to understand. The first stage of understanding included referring back to the Technical Communication textbook and taking the time to recognize the structures within a lab report. These components are the Title, Abstract, Introduction, Materials, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, and References.

Initially, my first thought was to jot down every idea that I had in order to determine how I wanted to structure this paper

Here we can see the thought process that I was going through initially:

This stage that I was at really helped me appreciate how important it is to plan out your steps and not just jump straight into the assignment.

This assignment also served as a stepping stone for me in research. In order to even properly prepare to even write this analysis, I had to find two similar lab reports and then compare them based on how closely each followed the rules of structuring a lab report. To find these two lab reports one resource that I resorted to was the City College OneSearch. The OneSearch is a valuable tool because of all the features that are available such as finding you a database that is more relatable to what you are trying to find, automatic citations, and even summaries of every work on there. Having the skill of researching and finding documents in order to assist you in your writing is very beneficial because it gives you a sure way to never lose information.

With the help of OneSearch and the Internet, I was able to collect a reasonable amount of sources to put into my work, but the issue came with differentiating with source would work better with the direction that I was taking my writing which is something that I continued to struggle with through the course