Throughout the semester, I learned lots of knowledge from Writing for Science class. The different paper topics and the different writing skills enriched my academic field in science writing. These papers improve my understanding and thinking ability. This course also helps me learn how to write as a scientist and improve my general literacy skills. There were six major assignments, which included the NY Times Summary/Response, Scholarly Article Analysis, General Audience paper, Lab Report and Poster, Annotated Bibliography, and Literature Review. Although this class was totally online and used blackboard for interaction, this class improved our ability to manage time allocation and improved efficiency in the study. From these assignments, I have developed various course learning objectives and changed my view on writing and development this semester.
The first assignment was a summary and evaluation of one NY Times assignment. I needed to find the article that reports on original research and refers to a scholarly research article. Through this assignment, I was able to strengthen the source used in evaluating and summarizing the article. I learned that writing a summary essay could not use the first person “I” voice. Also, it is important to summary the author’s purpose and how they use the information from a scholarly article. The area I had not progressed is I need to identify who is the audience in this summary essay.
The second assignment was Scholarly Article Analysis which found the scholarly article on the New York Times article was based. This essay strengthened the source used in the quoting and analysis of how the article is written. This assignment examined our engage in genre analysis skill and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. In this assignment, I learned how to analyze the information each part of the scientific method format, include abstract, introduction, method, results, and discussion. The style of writing in each section is very important for this analysis essay. Such as use present tense and passive voice in the introduction section and use past tense and passive voice in the method section. However, the hard part that I struggled with was the use of standard spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I need to do more practice in the grammatically to reduce my grammar mistakes in sentences.
The third assignment was General Audience paper which required us to find a peer-reviewed, scholarly, research article from an academic journal written in the IMRAD format. This assignment had more weight than the previous two assignments. Not only strengthen the source used in the analysis but also formulate and articulate my stance in detail in the writing. I also learned how to negotiate the writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of the genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. Consider background information needed for the audience was necessary for this general audience paper. The use of language and tone in this essay was very important because it could address your readers to clearly understand my writing intentions and what object you want to show. Also, I used many adaptation techniques to describe my writing purpose and explanation more specifically. Such as the use of definition adaptation to explain the study. At the same time, I have learned how to use CSE name-year citation style which was different from the MLA style that I have used it before.
This is an example of use CSE name-year citation in the reference:
Schuetze Pamela, Eiden D. Rina. Mar 23, 2005. The Association Between Maternal Cocaine Use During Pregnancy and Physiological Regulation in 4- to 8-Week-Old Infants: An Examination of Possible Mediators and Moderators. J Pediatr Psychol. 31(1): 15–26. [cited 2020 June 14]; Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093101/
The fourth assignment was the lab report and poster where we needed to work in the small group and came with the idea that science students face. The most important part of this assignment was to conduct the survey in order to conclude our purpose of the lab report and we could do an analysis base on the results. At the same time, we used various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to find scholarly articles in order to provide evidence to support our topic. Our group members developed and engaged in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. We also distributed the work equally that increases our working efficiency. Such as one group member is responsible for the section introduction and method. The other group member was responsible for the result section and I am responsible for the discussion section. I also learned how to design a poster in this assignment. From this assignment, I learned that how to write a lab report based on the IMRAD style of writing, the most important thing was making generalizations about the results to show the main point of the topic. Such as “We found that the professor’s heavy accent brings negative effects to the student which prevents students from achieving good academic performance. The majority of students indicated that the professor’s accent caused them to have language barriers in the classroom, which confirmed our hypothesis.” This example shows the generalizations of my lab report. This assignment is my favorite and most impressive paper because when I encounter unclear points or put forward my opinion to the group member’s view, the group members will immediately reply to my question and modify it, which greatly increases the efficiency and reduces some unnecessary errors. We share the work on google doc in order to express our thoughts more directly. Not only group members know each person’s point of view, but also they can add their additional thoughts to another person’s point of view. At the same time, each member checks grammatical problems and makes corrections to each other.
The fifth assignment and sixth assignments are Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review. The Annotated Bibliography aims to find three peer-reviewed, scholarly, original research articles on the same specific topic. I used various library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to this assignment. Then analysis the different points and similar points of these three articles that I could use these points for my literature review essay. For how to organize the review aspects, the literature review essay is different from the IMRAD format. I used the part of the analysis to replace the method part to formulate and articulate my stance of the review. At the same time, this literature review strengthened my source use in synthesizing and citing in the article. I was familiar with how to do the in-text citation and strengthen my stance with the use of paraphrasing.
Such as “The impairment of declarative memory greatly disturbs amnesia’s daily living, including personal independent living, mistakes at work, and difficulty in acquiring new knowledge (Gupta et al. 2009; Yoon et al. 2017).” and ” Hilverman et al(2017) found that impairment of declarative memory prevented amnesia patients’ word use when they talking.” I synthesized these sentences from the scholarly articles.
Professor gave a chance to peer editing in the small group that we can work together and came up with more ideas and clearly point out the problem we need to put right. The peer editing worksheet enhanced strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing. At the same time, I could acknowledge the range of linguistic differences from each other, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. I could absorb those feedback from peer editing to find out the problem, which I need to correct those errors. The peer editing worksheet can take my writing to another level.
Overall, I have developed some writing skills for the science writing field and improved my analysis ability by writing NY Times Summary/Response, Scholarly Article Analysis, General Audience paper, Lab Report and Poster, Annotated Bibliography, and Literature Review. The scientific method format is essential for future academic studies and works as a student of science. This class makes me familiar with specific forms and techniques used in scientific disciplines. These papers aim to evolve me on how to follow the scientific method format and how to analyze each part of them in the writing. At the same time, I knew how to use CSE Name-Year format to cite in the science paper. From past writing, I was difficult to sort out the structure of the article and have a serious grammar mistake. From this class, I knew how to organize the structure of the article base on instructions and rubric. Even though I still have a few grammar mistakes on my paper, I will pay more attention to grammar and make my writing more concise in the future. From this class, I learned lots of information from the assignments and it provided different writing techniques to me as a science writer. This class provided knowledge for my future scientific writing.
