Brenda Forrey

Professor Debra Purdy

English 312
Recommendation Report Reflection
17 October 2015
1. Considering that we completed our group project based on the proposal of another
student, I have learned a great deal about the topic since the proposal stage because I had
to catch up with the preliminary research that had been performed, as well as conducting
research for the project itself. For instance, I learned that there is evidence that some
students of Technical Communication may not be adequately prepared for a career in the
field by the curriculum and course content of their educational program. However, what
we learned in the course of our research is that the English Tech Comm program at Boise
State is designed to meet or exceed employers expectations of Tech Comm applicants in
the areas of business and interpersonal skills and software knowledge.
2. We made a slight change to the research plan outlined in the methods section of the
research proposal. The original proposal included four research tasks including a task to
analyze the current Tech Comm curriculum in order to assess the skills and software
knowledge students were expected to obtain by completing the program. We decided that
this research task really needed to be split into two parts: 1) determining skills the
program targets and 2) determining specific software knowledge the program provides.
Therefore, in our recommendation report, we addressed five distinct research tasks and
their accompanying results. We did not encounter problems with finding the research that
we hoped to findall the information we sought was readily available via online sources
and emailed professor surveys and interviews.
3. I think we were pretty nervous about the topic, perhaps fearing that we would discover
that we are paying for an education that is going to prove to be inadequate when entering
the job market. Personally, I was hoping that we would find some kind of gap in the
program, so that we could then make a strong recommendation for improvement
specifically, I was hoping to recommend that the program include training in the software
that employers most often utilize. However, as we completed our research into employer
needs, we found that they often desire employees with broad categorical experience (i.e.
designing web pages), but that they are willing to train on the specific software they use,
provided the candidate possesses the business and interpersonal skills required and can
demonstrate the ability to adapt to different software packages.
4. We worked really well as a team to conduct our research and to produce our first draft of
the recommendation report. We may have worked slightly less well as a team on
finalizing the report. I think the difficulties we experienced may have occurred because
we hadnt established a team leader for the project, did not thoroughly discuss our plan
for meeting the assignment deadline for the final report, and did not have an in-person
class meeting between the submission of the first draft and the final edition. That being
said, the difficulties that we had were minor, we did a decent job of communicating via
email, we sought and offered comments on the individual sections of the report, and we
were able to produce a good final draft in time to meet the assignment deadline.

Brenda Forrey
Professor Debra Purdy
English 312
Recommendation Report Reflection
17 October 2015
5. The strengths of our final report show through in the completeness of the research that we
performed, the analysis that lead to logical conclusions and recommendations, and the
completeness and professional appearance of the report itself. I think we did a good job
of making sure the sections were the appropriate lengths, our sources were cited in text
and matched the references list, and the table of contents and table of figures were
complete and correct. I think a relative weakness of our report is that the writers voice is
not entirely uniform throughout the report, and I wish that we had had more time and
better communication in place in order to rectify this in our final edition.