To me, writing has always felt unnatural. I often sat down hunched over in my chair or bed, trying to force pen on paper or words onto a google document. I knew what my end product was going to look like. But getting there was a difficult process. I upheld the typical five paragraph writing plan with its rigid structure, plugging in topic sentences, evidence, and analysis when deem necessary. Even as I looked toward this plan, my mind often remained stagnant. Writer’s block was my enemy. My writing felt jumbled and disconnected.
High School Senior English helped me improve. Instead of focusing on how to get from A to B, paying close attention to the tiny steps in between helped create smooth flow with my writing. My teacher’s ambiguous prompts forced me to do this, as I wrote about real experiences that I’ve had or as I created a story surrounding a special character. And now in Writing for the Sciences, I’ve tried to apply my previous skills to non-fictional writing on topics ranging from the rhetorical analysis of Trump’s photo-ops to the social, political, and ethical determinants of the COVID-19 vaccine.
While I believe I was successful in making sure my writing transitioned nicely, there were many other aspects of writing that I was able to explore in this course that was different from my high school senior creative writing class. At first, I thought that scientific writing would be complicated and rigid. I think back to my science courses where for lab reports, I am expected to write in a specific format and address multiple criteria that makes it hard to freely write. But if there was one thing I took away from Writing for the Sciences, it’s that scientific writing does not have to be rigid in structure. It can be fluid. It can be inventive. As a writer, you have the power to customize the story you want to present to the audience. You have the freedom to set the foundation of your argument, knitting together your pieces of evidence. You can display an issue at hand, highlighting individual perspectives that support your thesis. The compelling stories you tell and points you provide have the potential to lead your readers to think critically about the world around them.
The skills that are necessary for this role as a scientific writer are apparent from the Course Learning Objectives. Objectives 3, 4, and 5 were prominent during the Collaborative Group Project. As a group, it is essential to have quick and open communication regarding division of work, benchmark deadlines, and goals for the project. We had different routines in checking our emails so instead, we created a group chat to discuss details of the assignment and our plans to meet. Our team dynamic was delightful, and I became close friends with my peers. I credit how everyone was very diligent and outgoing, which made the writing process efficient and smooth. In setting writing goals, my group wanted to make sure that for the children’s book, the language utilized is simple and also that young readers are able to relate to the book. We had a protagonist, named Ryan, who went around his school to correct his classmates on how to practice health guidelines during this age of COVID-19. We felt that this is a common storyline in children’s books – readers would be able to imagine themselves as Ryan, who is the hero of the book. Overall, creating these writing goals allowed my group and I to quickly and effectively brainstorm the design of the book and write the dialogue.
The Literature Review Assignment emphasized Course Learning Objectives 7 and 8. During this task, I had to learn how to navigate online databases and utilize different types of sources in my writing. When looking at EBSCOhost and Gale, there were so many sources and multiple parameters that could be used to look for a specific source. I mostly used the boolean operators in conjunction with key terms in order to look for relevant articles, academic journals, and primary sources. In my writing, I was able to incorporate data from two studies, a piece of dialogue from a periodic newspaper, and also individual perspectives on vaccine hesitancy from a variety of news articles. I made sure that my writing was logical in utilizing these sources by outlining the points I wanted to make and listing sources that provide strong evidence for a specific point.
The Rhetorical Analysis was one of my favorite assignments. I got to write about a topic that I was very passionate about, which is the dynamic surrounding former President Trump in politics and social movements. I already had a strong stance towards one of Trump’s deceiving photo-ops in front of St. John’s Church, in which peaceful BLM protests were cleared of Trump’s walking path to the church. I was able to articulate my stance utilizing the rhetorical situation, in which one’s perspectives of an image may be due to one’s unique worldview – a culmination of background and experiences (Course Learning Objective 6). However, I believe that finding evidence for this writing piece was a learning process. I read articles from new sources from across a wide range of the political spectrum. I learned to initially read without initial assumptions, then read again, keeping in mind information I had read from other articles (Course Learning Objective 2). This helped me interpret why people from a different political background could look at an image in different ways.
Peer reviews helped me practice Course Learning Objectives 1 and 2. I sometimes struggle with accepting feedback for my writing. I believe this stems from how I equate the time I took in writing to the quality of writing I produce. But with this course’s peer reviews, I was able to receive very detailed thoughts on how I wrote and specific aspects of my writing and later on use the peer reviews to edit my writing multiple times. Even if my writing has ample clarity in my mind, it may not be as clear to other individuals who have different perspectives and linguistic backgrounds. Even if it was adding a sentence to make an ambiguous point more clear, or changing around a sentence to provide ample rhythm to the paragraph, these subtle changes taken together improved my writing.
All in all, this course has shown me the importance of writing in communicating and understanding the reality we live in. The process of writing can be fairly creative, pertaining to the audience one may want to address and the goals you have as a writer. I hope to further develop the skills I have practiced, not just in my future classes but also how I navigate the information I bump into on a daily basis.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
