Welcome to my Writing of Sciences portfolio. As you go through my portfolio, you will see the various assignments completed over the course of the semester. The portfolio consists of my reading responses, informative essay, research proposal, lab report, reflections, and pi-ku. Enjoy!
Self Assessment
The last assignment assigned in this course was the self-assessment essay. The self-assessment essay demonstrates my understanding of the goals I have and haven’t achieved in writing. It tells about my journey of developing as a writer throughout the semester and how it was reflected in my work. Enjoy!
Looking back at the work I have completed throughout the semester, my writing and perception of writing has evolved tremendously. I thought writing consisted of an introduction, body paragraphs and a conclusion with a few supporting claims. After taking this course, I have come to realize that writing take many other aspects into consideration such as sources, audience, stance, and genre. Writing has the power to persuade, informative, and entertain in many different ways. Through the 8 course learning objectives set for the writing of sciences class, my writing has improved.
When writing, it is crucial to acknowledge others’ range of linguistic differences. English is not everyone’s first language, therefore it is important to take that into account so I don’t lose my audience. With that in mind, I was able to simplify my work enough for my audience to fully understand the overall idea. For instance, in my group lab proposal I defined several scientific terms so people with little to no knowledge about the topic could make sense of it. Also, when my group members and I presented our lab report, we explained how the immune system works in a clear and simple way to successfully get our point across to the audience.
Throughout the semester we were assigned different types of essays, which ultimately helped to strengthen my ability to adapt to different audiences. This is associated with the negotiating your own writing goal and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation objective. For the controversy essay, I researched three perspectives on addiction, and presented it in an informative way. With the lab report, I used scientific writing to provide background information and introduce the lab report. In addition, it helped me to further develop in multimodal composing and genre analysis. When presenting the lab report, I used visual aids such as illustrations and graphs to help explain the results and discussion.
One of the 8 course learning objectives is to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. Throughout the semester, Professor Metenko conducted multiple peer review workshops and gave us the opportunity to revise our work. The peer review workshops allows us to receive constructive criticism, and helped us grow as writers. During a review workshop, one of my peers pointed out that I need to add some previous studies and in-text citations into my lab proposal introduction. I was able to revise my work, making it better than it was before. In addition, after every writing assignment we wrote reflection essays. It helped me point out my weaknesses, therefore I was able to avoid making the same mistakes in my next assignments.
In the beginning of the semester, Professor Metenko assigned multiple readings, which students had to summarize and critically analysis. These assignments helped to strengthen my source use practices. I came into this course not knowing how to critically analysis, but after a few homework assignment and a quiz, I improved significantly. This helped me further understand what the readings were about and also came in handy when we were assigned to write a lab report and controversy essay.
Usually, I tended to avoid interacting with my peers because I lacked communication skills and believed I worked best by myself. In this course, collaboration was incorporated into the class lectures as well as some of the assignments. This help me to achieve in developing and engaging in the collaborative and social aspect of writing processes. For our lab report, communicate was one of the key factors to getting our work done. My groupmates and I best communicate by text. We were able to motivate each other, as well as point out things each of us had to work on in order to become better writers. As a result of great communication between my groupmates and I, we reviewed 90s on our lab report and presentation.
Although I did achieve in majority of the course learning objectives, there are some objectives I did not do very well in. One of the objectives were utilizing various library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing project. For my assignments, I mainly focused on the outline and didn’t spend enough time looking for reliable and scholarly sources to support my claims. I thought sources weren’t as important when writing an essay, which is completely wrong. It is important to find valid sources in order to provide accurate information. I hope to improve on how to properly search and cite scholarly sources from various databases in the future .
Another objectives I didn’t see much improvement on is formulating and articulating a stance throughout my writing. I didn’t see much improvement because I felt I had a strong start in that area. In my controversy essay, I was to not take a stance and present it in a informative way, which wasn’t a problem. Also in our lab report, no new conclusion was reached from our observation, so our stance remained the same.
Overall, I came out of this course as a better writer and intend to use the skills I’ve gained in my future assignments. Although my writing skills have improve, there’s always room for growth and improvement. I came into this class unaware of what my career aspirations were, now I walk away motivated to pursue a career in the sciences. It was an absolute pleasure taking this course with Professor Metenko.
