Throughout the semester, I had noticed how difficult it was for me to write any assignment after the introductory letter. When I first wrote my intro letter it easier than the rest of the tasks because the subject was something I was familiar with, myself. When I wrote the scientist profile I was stoked because I was able to pick my topic, something that I was interested in and had some knowledge about it, but when I received my grade I noticed that my writing had some problems. One of them was gathering my resources.

When looking for resources I tend to do a brief and narrow search. For instance, for Lori E. Baker, she is just a professor at a University, meaning I wouldn’t find a lot of information about her, so what I did was just use what I could find on the University website. I was able to gather some of her work at the school, and some of her achievements as well, but I couldn’t find any background information about her, I tried emailing her multiple times, but she never responded back. The same was for my literature review paper and research paper, I noticed I don’t do so well collecting research and choosing the right material. Although I used City College databases, it did not aid me for this assignment, but it was very helpful for the rest. I usually use ScienceDirect because it’s easier to navigate and the filters are very useful as well, I tend to filter my research to articles instead of journals, encyclopedias, or newspaper articles. Before being able to have access to these databases I was taught to use Google Scholar, but I don’t find it reliable. It’s great when I was looking for a topic for my literature review paper, but after I saw something of interest, I would go to ScienceDirect directly after and search for articles that were in more depth and interesting.

While writing the literature review paper, I had included specific terms about my topic choice that I did not take into consideration my audience, I only had my professor as my audience. These terms I included, I did not define them, I was using acronyms and not letting my audience what they stood for, because I had the mentality that as long as I understood what they meant and my professor as well, there was no need for me to take anyone else in consideration.

Besides noticing my challenges in my writing, it has helped me with my reading, drafting, revising and editing (I don’t include self-assessing because I’ve never done one). Before taking this class, I wasn’t someone who would draft a paper or an essay, I would just get straight to writing without even having notes on any research I had done, but now I can’t start writing without at least having some sort of draft or plan. Sometimes I would start writing my introduction and then list off some ideas or topics I want to tackle in my paper which ends up with me rewriting my introduction. I noticed that with this my writing had a better flow to it, like professor Grove said, ‘each paragraph is its own little world.’ But besides my improvement in drafting I also made an improvement in revising, being by me or by my peers. I would have usually just write, use Word’s spell check and call it a day, I wouldn’t reread it, my goal was to just get it over with. But now I take my time to not just edit my spelling mistakes but my grammar too, although it is something I still need to improve much more. If I don’t reread my work I would not be able to notice how my writing had no flow or how fragmented a sentence was.

As I mentioned before, my need of improvement in my grammar, it is not my only goal. I also need to improve my writing for an audience and not just a teacher and learn to stop summarizing resources. Referring to my literature review paper and how I did not take into consideration the range of linguistic differences in my resources, it made it harder for the intended audience my paper was meant for. And that is still a not issue for me because I still struggle with ­­synthesizing, I still summarize big chunks of text and sometimes I think I’m writing my own ideas and I won’t cite because I think that it’s not a summary that I’m actually explaining my source and synthesizing, due to this I’ve been accused of plagiarizing and I understand this is why it is still my mine goal. For the future I would like to ask a peer to revise my work, it could not only help me with my grammar but in what my audience understand form my resource’s language and check for plagiarism, having a second pair of eyes is always helpful.

The over view of this semester was very helpful, not only did I learn my strengths and weaknesses as a writer, but I also learned a lot of tips and skills from the class and the textbook. I do hope that my progress is noticeable to others as it is to me.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.