David Agbato Writing for the Sciences
Self Assessment Essay Prof. Voisard
The Spring Writing for the Sciences class has been a vital class that has helped me improve in many areas of my writing. Throughout this semester, Writing for the Sciences has strengthened my writing skills. With this, I think I have been able to achieve the course learning objectives very effectively and completely. For example, I was able to expand my writing ability into more writing genres. An example of this is in the Literature Review. I had never written a literature review before this, so I really had know idea how to dive into it. However, once I learned about it more and realized that it was very similar to a synthesis essay but from a neutral point of view, I was then ready to write the paper. My literature review was about sleep. In this essay, my group split up to talk about sleep in different sections. I talked about how dreams are influenced by the subconscious, along with different types of dreams. We overall wrote about the importance of sleep and how beneficial it has proven to be. Writing different genres of essays like the literature review has helped me to expand my writing abilities and increase my skills in the creative process.
I think that developing as a writer does not only mean perfecting your writing style and grammar, but it also has to do with being able to collaborate and work with others to further help your writing skills improve. This has to do with my efforts in the Children’s Book. Collaborative skills were important for both the creation of the book, along with the recording and presenting of it. My group included Jenna, Aliya, and I. In our Children’s Book, we expanded on our sleep topic from The Literature Review. Our book was about a boy, named Ethan, who was having frequent nightmares. After his mom took him to the doctor’s office, it was found that these nightmares were being caused by sleep deprivation. The story emphasized the importance of getting enough sleep at night, and how doing so can have its benefits, while not doing so can be detrimental. With this, I think that through this collaborative project, we were able to effectively work together to create a cohesive project that was creative and flowed well. Jenna and Aliya focused on the script, while I worked on the images and incorporated the dialogue into the picture book with speech bubbles. Once we finished our respective areas, we then came together to make sure the book explained about sleep the way a child would understand. We met outside of class on zoom on multiple occasions to make it the best we could. This allowed us to perfect our project, while also improving our communication and collaborative skills. Through my efforts in this Children’s Book presentation, I think that I properly developed the social aspects of the writing processes.
The Writing for the Sciences class has allowed me to improve my writing skills. With this in mind, I feel like I have not progressed much in my ability to do research and analysis. Research is an important aspect of writing, as it is the backbone of all the statements made and evidence given in your essay. However, this is not because I did not spend adequate time on getting better, but instead because I feel like I was already strong in this area beforehand. An example of this is in my Research Analysis. In this essay, I analyzed a photo of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks. For this essay, while I think I could have improved a little bit in my writing, I truly do think that I did well in analyzing the photo, while also researching background information concerning the photo. Overall, I think that over the course of the whole semester, I have improved in many aspects. I have been able to expand my writing ability into more genres, while also perfecting specific writing projects through group collaboration.
