This class has been influential in my understanding of proper research strategies as well as becoming well versed in using the IMRAD structure of writing research papers. Learning these strategies while taking Writing For the Sciences gave a glimpse into the life of a scientist’s day to day work as well as preparing me for the future work I will be doing as a medical professional. This class also has allowed me to see a general improvement in my general literacy skills as I have been able to grasp material presented to me by sometimes difficult research articles to be easier to understand.

One of the learning objectives I was successful in completing was acknowledging your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and drawing on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. I was especially successful in this during the times we did peer revisions for the first drafts of each of our assignments. The feedback I received from them was incredibly helpful as I used that to guide the way I improve the quality of the papers. Also, the varying perspectives of the feedback gave me so many angles and ways to approach revising my papers. I found this very helpful when I was writing my General Audience Paper, as it was very hard to write since I had never really written journal style prior to that so I didn’t know how to go about it from the beginning. I managed to put together a first draft for the assignment the day they were due and I received such helpful feedback from peers who understood the assignment well. Their feedback as well as discussing ways I can fix and how they went about their papers and how I can possibly integrate similar strategies was a key component in helping me do well on the assignment. Through the rigorous editing and revisions it also helped me complete another learning objective which was  enhancing strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. Also I was able to complete the learning objective  develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes because the constant conversations I had with my classmates in the classroom as well as reviewing each other’s work and giving some much critiquing of each others grammatical choices as well as making annotations of where to improve as well as me doing the same thing for them helped strengthen this collaborative effort.

Another one of the learning objectives I was successful in completing was to negotiate my own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situations. I was successful at this in my Summary of New York Times Article/Evaluation. In that paper, I was able to build on my skills from previous English class regarding  genre, medium, and rhetorical situations and talk about them in indepthly in this paper. For instance, regarding rhetorical situations I was able to correctly identify the author’s purpose in the New York Times article such as when I say, “The author’s purpose was to bring awareness to the lesser-known effects of extended quarantine on the elderly, mainly physical problems. For instance, in the article, the author says, “When you’re hospitalized, and you’re older, it takes a long time to get back on your feet,” said Marla Beauchamp, who researches mobility, aging, and chronic disease at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “Covid is still impacting them in significant ways months and months later” (Span 2022). This shows how the coronavirus impacts the elderly in many aspects of their lives other than the high mortality rate.” Here in my paper I was able to show what the author’s purpose of writing this article was as well as provide sufficient evidence to help support this claim further showing how I was able to improve my skills in rhetoric situations through this  essay medium for analysis of journal articles based on a research article. Rhetorical situation was a topic I was unaware of prior to entering college but through the various assignments I believe I have gained a great understanding of it and helped me improve its various components like medium and genre. Also, through this I was also able to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond through the various research papers we have read and analyzed in the papers I wrote. 

 One of the learning objectives I was successful in completing was being able to formulate and articulate a stance through and in my writing.  I was successful at this in my Lab Report/Poster. In this assignment, my group and I were able to discover a problem that the student body was facing and created a hypothesis for what we think is the correlation between sleep and grades. This helped guide our research and formulate all the factors used in the IMRAD format.

 One of the learning objectives I was successful in completing was being able to practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects. I was able to do this effectively for the annotated bibliography and my literature review where I could use various sources from the sites like PubMed to write my papers as well as analyzing them to grasp the content and use them effectively in the papers. This also allowed me to strengthen my source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources) as well as I had to apply all of these factors into my literature review such as using the subheading to help explain and synthesize the information I talked about.

Before enrolling in Writing For The Sciences my knowledge on the various aspects I have been exposed to in this class had been limited such as analyzing journalistic writing, writing journal style writing while utilizing IMRAD format, and I am so grateful to have been in a class that taught me so much valuable skills that I will carry with me all the way through my professional career.