Communication Portfolio

I came into ENG 2003 expecting a soft course attached to an engineering degree, and left thinking of it as the closest thing in my second year to a design course. The reframing happened around the Axioms of Communication in Lecture 04. What makes the axioms useful is that they describe how communication behaves rather than prescribe how to write, so they explain a failure instead of only forbidding it. Axiom 8, that communication is audience-centred, is the one I keep returning to, because it turns a vague instruction to write well into an engineering question: who reads this, what do they already know, and what must they do afterwards. Once the audience is a constraint rather than a courtesy, revision stops feeling arbitrary.

The course surprised me in a second way. I assumed the difficulty would be producing text; it turned out to be structuring it. Term Project 1 ran across four phases and each failed differently: my annotated bibliography hedged its criticism, my draft buried its conclusion, and the final report only worked once the conclusion moved into the executive summary and every figure earned its place in the surrounding text. None of those are sentence-level problems, which is what I had assumed writing problems were.

The most useful content was Lecture 06 on technical writing, specifically the instruction to explain things before presenting them. I had been doing the reverse: introducing Figure 1, then explaining it. Inverting that changed my report more than any other single edit, because a reader who understands why a figure exists reads it correctly the first time. Judged against the 7 C's, that revision bought clarity and conciseness first, and completeness, correctness, and concreteness followed from them: once the structure held, the missing citations, the unsupported generalisations, and the drift in register were obvious rather than buried.

The most interesting topic was the rhetorical triangle, and specifically using it to evaluate other people's work rather than to plan my own. In Phase 1 I used ethos, logos, and pathos to judge four sources, and the framework made my criticism precise instead of merely polite. It connected to Axiom 4, that communication is a principal way of establishing credibility: a systematic review with a documented appraisal protocol reads as more trustworthy than an equally accurate blog post because the protocol is itself a communicative act. Axiom 7, that communication is inherently ambiguous, I met from both directions. It is the subject of my report, since regulators and the public demand that algorithmic systems be fair without a shared operational definition of the word. It is also what happened to me: a peer reviewer read my draft's register as informal where I had read it as plain, and neither of us was misreading the sentences, only weighting them differently. The axiom stopped being a slogan once I had been on the receiving end of it.

Description. The episode I want to reflect on is the revision of Term Project 1 between Phase 2 and Phase 4. I submitted a draft, received blind feedback from three peer reviewers through PeerScholar, and rebuilt the report. Two of the three had been assigned reports on entirely different topics, so parts of their commentary did not describe my document at all. The third engaged with my report directly and told me to confirm every claim was cited and adopt a more consistently formal tone.

Feelings and evaluation. My first reaction to the mismatched reviews was that the feedback was wasted, and my reaction to the formal-tone comment was defensive, because I thought the draft already read formally. Both reactions were wrong, and noticing that is the part worth keeping. The draft did contain contractions and informal phrasing, and the advice in the off-topic reviews transferred perfectly well. The feedback I resisted most is the feedback that changed the document most.

Analysis. Two axioms explain why this was harder than it should have been. Axiom 6, that communication involves interpersonal risk, describes both directions of a blind peer review: the reviewer risks being wrong in writing, and the author risks being seen. Axiom 2, that all communication involves relation as well as content, explains my defensiveness, because I read a comment about tone as a comment about competence. Separating those layers is what let me write Appendix A, where I mapped each piece of feedback to a change and declined one suggestion with a reason rather than ignoring it silently.

Conclusion. What improved most is structuring a document for a reader: executive summaries that state conclusions first, figures that are introduced and interpreted, and headings that let someone navigate without reading linearly. Two things still need work. The first is conciseness, the C I most consistently fail: my instinct under uncertainty is to add qualification rather than cut it, and both the Phase 2 draft and the final report's Discussion hedge more than a reader needs. The second is my first reaction to criticism. I acted on the tone feedback, but only after dismissing it, and a reviewer who is right does not become right because I eventually came around.

Action plan. Two concrete changes. First, I will treat every first draft as over-length and cut a fixed proportion before anyone else reads it, rather than adding qualification when I feel uncertain. Second, at Appli AI I write pull request descriptions that other developers act on, so I will apply Axiom 8 to them explicitly: what does this reviewer need to approve this change, and nothing else. In 7 C's terms that is conciseness in service of clarity, since a description that makes a reviewer hunt for the change has failed even when every sentence in it is correct. Lecture 04 noted that between fifty and ninety per cent of a technical job is spent on communication tasks. I now read that as an argument for treating writing as part of the engineering, not as a reporting layer bolted on afterwards.