Honestly, when I first told that this class would be a required elective, I was really disappointed. Its not that I didn’t like writing classes, in fact I did admit some could be fun ,but at that point i had enough. I had taken two writing classes last semester and I was a bit sick of them. I admit that this “Writing for the Sciences ” class was really interesting. The first day I walked into the class, I had many expectations. I thought it would be going over topics that I had learned the previous. But boy was I totally wrong!!!Since I had taken freshman composition in my first semester, topics like rhetorical situation were repeated but what surprised me was the type of writing was going to be done.
Over the span of this class, I had written many papers that I had never encountered before . For once, I felt like for once this was a writing class that was worth taking. All of the papers had to do with the sciences and some of topics were related to my field. I wrote papers that may eventually become applicable to my life in the future. While the course did contain elements from the previous writing courses, I felt like it was taught to me in a new light. When I took freshman composition , I dealt with the rhetorical situation but throughout the course, but i never felt like I really understood them.
During this course, I realized that I tend to write better during night.I would usually sit on the floor with my cup of lemonade and chocolate chip cookies. I would usually create outlines first and brainstormed all the ideas that I had in mind. After that, I would start to write my introduction to the paper. Honestly, that is where I get the most writer’s block.It’s just so hard trying to collect and connect your thoughts together. Sometime I felt that the idea was there, but I didn’t know how to exactly express it.
Course Learning Outcomes
Outcome 1: Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.
This course learning outcome never really made much sense to me. I took it to mean utilizing the different perspectives of your peers to improve your writing but that seemed to overlap the course learning outcome that dealt with the social aspects of writing, so I never really saw the reason to make this its own separate outcome. That being said, I still feel like I met this outcome because throughout the course I believe that the knowledge of my peers has given me more to think about and has helped me better my work. For example, Professor Jane commented on my technical description and it helped me alot.
Outcome 2: Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. I don’t think much has changed for me for this outcome. My drafting process is to make the first draft as perfect as possible so there is little to correct for the final and this generally leads to little revision other than spelling and grammar. If anything has changed at all it would be my strategies for editing. I have looked at many works from my peers throughout this course and after editing them I feel that I have gained valuable experience in that category.
Outcome 3: Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.
Before I even began writing any of my papers I was forced to consider the various elements of the rhetorical situation and think about what I wanted to accomplish and how I was going to do it. For example, I had to decide how the tone of my papers were going to change based on things like the audience and purpose such as in my technical description where I tried to maintain an objective and strictly formal tone.
Then when I did my professional letter the tone was more personal because my audience and purpose were different.
Outcome 4: Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
This was probably the most relevant course learning outcome for this class because a majority of it involved interacting with my peers. For the proposal we all worked in groups to create a solid plan. We also did a variety of peer review exercises for every paper so that we could use feedback from one another. As a group ,we did peer reviews in class and the rest of them were done online. Below is part of my group’s proposal :
Outcome 5: Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. I feel that this learning outcome was also very relevant for this course because we wrote in a variety of genres for the course. I also want to say that we spent a good amount time analyzing each genre before we wrote our papers by reading the textbooks and creating simplified versions of the genre. For the proposal I created a PowerPoint in a hybrid homework about datatypes to help solidify my understanding of the genre. Below are some slides from that Powerpoint.
Outcome 6: Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing.
This course learning outcome was very hazy for me and I don’t think that I properly met it. As stated previously while I know that everyone has an opinion on a topic I was always unsure about how I felt about my own topic and so I had difficulty conveying my stance within my papers. I do however think that I have improved over the span of this course because I was able to express my feelings within my scientific controversy paper.
Outcome 7: Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.
This outcome played a vital role during the course because we had to spend a lot of time doing research. Our research became even more formal when the class visited the library to learn how to use the CCNY Database to locate credible, peer reviewed sources. I didn’t utilize the database as much as I would have liked to, and I got my sources from various places scoured across the internet.
Outcome 8: Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).
The last course learning outcomes deals with the usage of sources. This outcome was not particularly difficult to meet but it was different.I utilized my sources mainly by paraphrasing and summarizing because I was never really a fan of directly quoting sources. Below is an example of my usage and citation of a source I used in my group paper:
In conclusion , this writing class was definitely not an easy one.However , I must say that I have learned a lot from the readings and the assignments I have written. We wrote a lot papers ,which were more than 3 pages long and I spent a long time agonizing over them.However, I must emphasize that this class focused on helping students write in a critical snd clear manner. This class has helped me use more scientific language and I am extremely grateful for that.Every major assignment has taught me something new, and it has enabled me to write more like a scientist. Looking back, I am definitely proud of the amount of improvement I have done.
