A Personal Proposal Memo

For my proposal, I decided to focus on the commercialization of spaceflight. I chose this topic so that I would be able to use my experiences as an Aerospace Engineering student and as an undergraduate researcher in the University of Maryland's Space Systems Laboratory to help me write the paper. In addition, I have closely followed the growth of these commercial "new- space" companies for several years, even travelling to Florida on two occasions to watch the launches of the privately-developed Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. As a result, I thought researching the commercial spaceflight industry would be not just something I could readily access, but a topic that would be interesting to write about, as well.

From my secondary research, I discovered that people's views on whether spaceflight should be commercialized, and to what extent, frequently depends on their views on commercialization in general, a much broader element of a person's political ideology than just their views on spaceflight. As a result, I decided to evaluate commercial spaceflight through a political lens and proposed a survey of likely voters at the University of Maryland for my project.

After completing my first draft of the project, I felt that I had a fairly strong proposal. The structure of the proposal is similar to the Thesis Proposal I helped to write for my Gemstone team, so I had a pretty firm understanding from the beginning about how to develop an effective proposal. This proposal assignment does focus more on identifying the audience for your research than my Gemstone proposal did, so that was one of the areas I addressed first at my writing center visit. After meeting with my writing tutor, I was glad to hear that he felt I had done a good job of defining my primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences, as well as the proposal's Gatekeeper.

Order custom essay A Personal Proposal Memo with free plagiarism report

450+ experts on 30 subjects Starting from 3 hours delivery

Get Essay Help

I also worked with my writing tutor to restructure a couple of sentences that were too wordy and clarify a couple of points in my secondary research. As in the extended definition, I found it useful to have my paper reviewed by an "outsider" at the writing center. When writing about a technical topic that you are familiar with, it is easy to lapse into industry jargon without explaining what it means, because it is commonplace for you. My writing tutor helped me clarify some explanations that would be clear to someone in the space industry but may not be easily understood by everyone in the proposal's audience.

I also made several revisions based on my peer reviews and Professor Lalwani's comments. I added some citations to paragraphs that appeared under-cited and added a couple more sentences of explanation in my introduction. I also removed passive voice from a definition in my secondary research. I chose not to include any information about the 2016 Presidential Election, as one peer reviewer suggested, since commercial spaceflight was not a major issue in the platforms of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. I was unable to make any changes from my second peer reviewer because none were suggested.

Overall, I think I was already an effective audience-based writer coming into the class, but the assignments we have completed so far have made me more conscious of my audience and specifically tailoring my essays to them. In both my extended definition and proposal writing center meetings, my writing tutors said I did a good job of tailoring my pieces to my audience. I found that while writing the proposal, however, I was more comfortable explicitly identifying my audience and explaining the project's relevance to them than I was in the extended definition. I think the class has helped me write more consciously for my audience, which has helped me improve on a skill I was already fairly good at.

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Run a free check or have your essay done for you

Check my essay Hire Writer