Small intro:
Hi! I’m Ariana, a first year biology major at the City College of New York. I enjoy writing for the most part and I chose to take this class to better my skills in the writing I will use in the future. In the tabs above you will find the names of my assignments. Each tab will include a draft and peer review if I have one for that assignment, a short self assessment, and the final product. This is a collection of all of my work from my Writing for the Sciences class in the Spring 2023 semester. Enjoy!
Final Self-Assessment
When I first chose writing for the sciences on my schedule for the Spring 2023 semester I thought that it would be like any other English class I had taken. It was a part of the courses that I needed to take for my major so I figured I would take it and I am so glad I did. I have always enjoyed writing for the most part but at times get really stuck or intimidated by bif projects. Good writing skills are very important in all majors, but specifically in STEM. I am a biology major at The City College of New York and writing for science is difficult, a lot of research is needed and you have to carefully formulate sentences to get your point across.I definitely saw improvements in my writing throughout the semester.
Writing is a way we can communicate and show our ideas. At the beginning of the semester I wasn’t too sure that scholarly writing could be interesting and would only write for a good grade. Throughout the semester, I realized that to become a better writer you have to explore different styles of writing; not all writing styles will be enjoyable but the only way to get better is through practice. Writing is not something you can just be good at, it requires a lot of thought and time to do. A paper will never be good if you put forth little effort because you don’t get to reflect on your ideas. Every sentence matters because every sentence has a statement that will relate like the nice flow of a river.
This course worked on my rhetorical sensibility because each assignment had a target audience. The audience affects the works significantly because you have to write in a way that they would best understand. For the literature review and collaborative research project, we targeted an older audience so we spoke of concepts and used vocabulary that most adults would be familiar with. Each assignment also had us anticipate different goals because they needed different outcomes. You had to formulate the way you wanted your writing to come out based on the different topics and audiences. For my cover letter I wanted my writing to be formal and professional but for my rhetorical analysis I wanted it to be simple and easy to read. We also had a few readings during the semester and while reading them we were to annotate. After a while I found it easier to analyze texts and find purpose and audience. The rhetorical analysis also helped me better understand how to analyze content other than text since it was a video advertisement I wrote about.
The group project, including the literature review, collaborative research project, and presentation, impacted my writing positively. It helped me improve on working as a team since we had to communicate and work together to formulate our pieces. The literature review had us look at the library archive and read scholarly articles to write about. It used to take me so long to find a good scholarly article but with the tricks learned in class I was able to find articles after skimming through a few in the archives. The literature review was set to be in APA style format; it was helpful to have group mates to ask when I needed help on citations or formatting problems. My citations were better in the final draft after peer review helped me see some mistakes I made and I will keep those mistakes in mind for future projects. I had to use information from the scholarly articles without giving my opinion so I had to paraphrase a lot.
Each assignment had a draft and peer review. The draft helped make an outline to the final product and the peer review helped us gain outside input to our drafts to make the final product better. The assignments needed editing and revising; I had to reread my papers and find mistakes or add sentences to improve its quality. My papers all had set points or stances I was arguing for. Writing for the sciences helped me reach beyond the expectations I had for improvement in my writing.
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