When entering this course, I noticed right away the difference between my writing and the writing of my peers. In order to improve myself and strive to do better, I did find it helpful that I was able to view the work my peers submitted on discussion boards when talking about the same subject. Seeing from their perspective when regarding those topics, I learned about them more and was informed on things I may have missed the first time around. Discussing what we thought or knew about those subjects also proved to prepare me for the next discussion board or paper because I would use similar questions to help me write about what I got from reading those articles.
Using the discussion in class, I got into the habit of writing notes down and wrote notes to help prepare me for major papers such as the ones you see for CPR and Controversy. I found it helpful that the professor could highlight the papers we submitted and make notes on them so we can better revise them. I have a hard time realizing my mistakes when writing, so when it came time to revising them, I used the professor’s advice by reading them out loud except I would read it to others as if it’s a presentation.
My goal this semester was to strive towards professional writing but I still wanted to keep the reader interested in scientific topics. I figured the audience I would be showing my work to would be college students like me; however I wanted to make my work simplistic enough so that students of slightly different majors and studies could understand a bit more of what they are reading, such as with the technical description paper. I wanted to make it seem as if I was conversing with the audience in the controversy paper because in order to give my readers an opinion to two sides of an argument, I wanted the paper to seem more personable to what may be a much harder subject to talk about.
Knowing that I wouldn’t get to see my group until the day of presentation because we are all so busy, we discussed each other’s roles when collaborating on our group paper and presentation ahead of time using google docs and discord. If anything seemed amiss on the group paper, I would send the group a message discussing it and how we would improve it. I encouraged everyone to write down their notes on the slides ahead of time in the case that we could not prepare for a mock presentation. On the day of presenting, we went over how we would go over our parts with the little time we had and improved on any parts we felt were rushed or sounded awkward.
During the development of the presentation, the use of pictures and video would help add substance to the writing we put into it. I feel like I was able to learn about how I should present my papers scientifically regardless the subject it talks about. Using the different perspectives of students with different majors in the class, I was able to see how I could talk about the topic I’m writing about in a biological way and in a psychological way.
The controversy paper was by far my most difficult paper to master because you have to make sure there’s no bias when showing both sides in an argument. When it came time to showcase my opinion after listening to both sides, I used the evidence to support why I felt more towards that side of the argument and still gave evidence to show why you might lean more to one side than the other.
In previous classes, I already had an understanding on how to use the CCNY Library Database to search up articles; however the librarian, who the professor introduced to us, did give me more insight on how to advance search up peer reviewed articles and introduced me to controversy articles and the science direct option for searching up peer reviews.
This class reminded me that it’s ok to paraphrase and encouraged us to do so, I was so used to quoting in previous semesters that I feel it took away from what I learned from the articles. I have only practiced APA format a lot recently so the class did reintroduce to me how to use MLA format.
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