Jeremy Rodriguez

Professor Coppola

Writing for the Sciences

12/16/19

Abstract

I deleiberly got better with most of the learning objects such as enhancing my ability to edit my own papers, learn to read my work in a way where I can be detached from what I wrote, developed new strategies to fight a difficulty to work. Some points I was not able to experiment with or did unintentionally like experiment with negotiating writing goals, acknowledging others linguistic differences and doing genre analysis. Over all the semester was more helpful than expected allowing me to transfer a lot of the skills into projects outside of class. 

Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility

I do not fully understand what that means. My guess was, notice that everyone express themselves differently and use that to help your writing. I can not find a place where I was able to do that except taking others at their word when then asked for more detail. 

Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment

For all aspects of this class I found that setting a timer allowed me to work through my moments when I thought I was not able to focus or worse, did not want to. For drafts I found that allowing myself to write without worrying about what I wrote would give me more than the required page numbers for later projects and allowed me to refine and remove pieces. I appreciated the fact that the professor allowed for revisions because it allowed me to fail to succeed. During editing and revision I found it to be easier if I stepped away for a day or two in order to forget what I had written. For my long essay, handing in the first draft I had an acute sense of how I failed because even though I wrote it two days before all the things I wrote made less sense once printed out and expanded. I learned to be harsher on myself when reading. I purposefully would try to find out why what I had written was wrong which eventually became counter productive to my other classes.

Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation

I was not present to this objective in my writing which is likely apparent in my writing. Each project was almost identical to one another except IMRAD. IMRAD was useful because it removed anything that was not necessary.   

Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes

Collaboratively I found I enjoyed the critical looking at others work which I discovered during the course. At times handing my paper off gave me a new clarity seeing that the words I wrote make no sense. Have someone else read it, voluntarily unlike class, was rewarding because there was a clear sense of working towards excellence. During the group project it was difficult to transition from others work and back out to form a cohesive narrative. Since everyone focus on their own issues, in order to avoid gridlock, it was clear everyone wrote differently.  

Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond

I did not play with genre, not deliberately, so I would say that was a fail. My writing was one note, trying to get cross what was being asked of me and nothing else. At times I would get distracted and write tangents which were penalized. 

Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing

Actively choosing a stance was simple but it allowed me to see how few times I have thought through why I believe something. While choosing one article to write about I clearly had an opinion but found it hard to support it. Other times I found that I needed to generate an opinion in order to hit the page count because I was not initially engaged because there was nothing distinct I choose to learn about.  

Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects

During this class I found how useful sourcing was, and the amount of literature surprising. At times it was difficult to know when something needed to be cited, a distinction of what is generally common knowledge was hard to draw. During my long paper where I tried to use a wide array of sources from the economics to psychology and using analytical research for climate change I found it rewarding to find what these people worked on. At some point I went source crazy and got about 46 and had to begin cutting, it was really fun.     

Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)

Out of the skills listed I believe I got the most practice in summarizing because I went off the assumption that economics was not directly in my audiences field of knowledge which lead me to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the topic. In evaluation I often got stuck with sources trying to understand what the researchers were trying to explore and what their results meant. I read one study, relating to the long paper involving the lack of behavior change in people with dire consequences, 4 times in 2 sittings. I felt I did not evaluate the sources as rigorously, assuming that being peer reviewed was enough. When I did evaluate one source, I was scared if I was reading bad science because one of the authors was not a reputable as I assumed.