During my time in this Writing for the Sciences class, I have learned more about myself, my writing and science in an academic manner. By creating and allowing a forum for scientific writing, this Writing for the Sciences course has given me the ability to grow as a writer. In this course, we have covered genre analysis, articulated our stances in writing, practiced using various library resources, and researching.

At the beginning of our class, I remember constructing the science times assignment with the addition of the scholarly analysis. The assignment was instructed us to choose a fascinating academic article and to write a 700 word summary about it. An evaluation of the scholarly article followed this that the New York Times article was based on. It was an exercise that employed us to use our writing skills to evaluate journalistic writing. I chose to write about the growing epidemic of the River Valley fever(RVF) virus  and its detrimental effects on pregnant women. While my first draft was , I lacked a developed evaluation of author of the New York Times article. For example I mentioned that “Baumgaertner used pathos within her description of the scholarly article.”. After reading the revision comments from my first peer-editing session, I noticed that I needed to expand more on the evaluation portion of the assignment. I expanded the sentence into “Baumgaertner used the stories of two newborns who were tragically afflicted, adding pathos to her summary and allowing her audience to feel something for the victims of the said disease.” When I was writing the science times assignment and the scholarly analysis I noticed such a difference in verbiage and scientific jargon used in the New York Times article versus the scientific article, even though they concerned the same topic. The New York Times article used more simplistic language as compared to the scholarly article which was riddled with phrases like “a causative agent of miscarriage in late gestation.” I was able to acknowledge the range of linguistic differences as resources to further summarize and analyze both documents to develop a competent argument relating to the RVF virus.

The development of the lab report and the creation of the accompanying poster was a collaborative process that I felt further developed my group work skills. This assignment forced me to be responsible for an essential part of someone’s grade. Through group deliberation,  each person in my assigned group was assigned a part of the lab report. I was personally responsible for the abstract and introduction. It’s important to note that to write a cohesive abstract, and I needed a developed method, results, conclusion, and discussion section, which my fellow group members were responsible for. My group members and I were continuously discussing aspects of the assignment that would make our lab report the very best it could be. During the semester, we also developed the collaborative and social aspects of the writing processes through extensive peer-editing. In our in-class peer review for the first essay, we were split into groups of three, so we would have the chance to peer edit two other essays as well as having our own peer-edited. The positive to collaboration and peer editing my writing was being able to see my writing from another point of view. In this class, I also found myself enhancing my strategies for reading, drafting, editing, and self-assessment. In all the assignments, I discovered that one read-through of each essay was not enough; a lot of the time, the peer editing process caught the punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes I had missed.

With the general audience essay, the purpose was to assess why a general audience would be interested in the research article I had chosen, tone, and what kind of an appeal is appropriate. In the presentation portion of the assignment, I had to apply the advanced knowledge I learned from the article to make it understandable for a general audience. In this assignment, I was able to negotiate my own writing goals and audience expectation regarding conventions of the genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. I also engaged in multimodal composing to explore effective writing across different contexts. Lastly, I was able to achieve a formulation and articulation of a stance through and in my writing. With my general audience essay, I chose to talk about contraception, and the article I wanted was relating contraceptives to the prevalence of cancer. I had to identify and define a lot of the scientific jargon from the chosen scholarly article to put it in layman’s terms for my essay. I had to accurately summarize the scholarly article while keeping it understandable. I expanded on the female menstrual cycle and the statistics of contraception use in the United States. In my essay, I even gave a hypothetical example so that my audience would be able to visualize a scenario where contraception would be important. I provided an ample amount of definitions and background on my topic to make conceptualizing contraception and cancer risk an easy task for my audience.

Something I struggled with before coming to this class was using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to my writing assignments. However, a library session with Ms.Claudia made that aspect a little easier for me.  For example, my annotated bibliography (in which my topic was herbal treatment and their efficacy of treatment for arthritic pain) required finding four related scholarly articles. Using several databases such as Pubmed and Google Scholar, I was able to find many articles that pertained to my topic. Using the various filters on the databases, I was able to narrow the articles I found to articles that followed IMRAD format and were not literature reviews. This was also helpful for the literature review, where I had to incorporate those articles seamlessly into my writing. In writing that literature review, I was able to strengthen my source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources). After completing that worksheet about citing in CSE Name-Year format, I was to effectively and correctly use this form of citation in all my writing. I did struggle with citing my references at first in several of my assignments in that I struggled with formatting my CSE Name Year in-text and works cited page citations. In fact, I was penalized in several of my final drafts because my heading and parenthetical citations did not conform to CSE Name Year requirements.

Explicitly, my perceptions of writing have evolved in that I now understand what it takes to generalize scientific writing, understand the importance of proper citation and learned to weave scientific knowledge effectively into my writing in order to tell a cohesive message. I struggled with citations initially, but in writing specific assignments (annotated bibliography and literature review), I faced learning the proper way to cite to give credit where credit was due. My general audience essay specifically helped to enhance my manner of explanation to those who are not familiar with the topic. By making scholarly articles understandable and evaluating their stances, I was forced to understand what those scholarly articles were saying. I had to learn to read, annotate, and understand what the scientific jargon meant in the scope of the world.

I realize my time in Writing for the Sciences course was eye-opening. I approached this class, believing that I was already a solid writer who did not need to improve in any place. Instead, I discover that excellent Writing is a continual process and takes consistent practice. I not only learned how to write better, but in a way, I opened myself up to writing more effectively.