This semester of Fall 2020 was an unorthodox one. We were all confined in our homes and joining lectures through a zoom where it was full of blank screens and anonymous faces. It felt especially odd with this class because right from the beginning I got the sense that Writing for the Sciences is a course full of collaboration with peers and requires expression of opinions supported with facts to a wider public. There were many learning objectives for this class this semester and they include building on our writing, reading, linguistic and collaborative skills. Throughout this course we worked on many collaborative projects and engaged with our peers about the work that they were doing. We picked a topic in the beginning of the semester and continued to research and work on that topic making projects and even a public awareness campaign. In this reflection essay, i will walk you through our projects and how my perceptions of what writing is have evolved as a result of the projects i worked on with my classmates.
The first learning objective in this class was to acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. While working with my group on the first project this semester, the children’s book about lack of sleep, I noticed that each group member had a specific approach that they would take. For example, Evan would rather take a more statistical approach and he has maintained that throughout the semester. Even in his literature review paper he focused mainly on statistical studies to get his point across. My approach to the Children’s book however was a more humorous and engaging approach. I felt as if humor needed to be a key factor within our project to help the audience, which was largely made up of children, better engage with the material. I used references to popular video games such as Need for Speed to better help children relate to the material and increase engagement.
The second learning objective is to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. The peer review sessions after every project helped my writing immensely especially for the literature review. For our literature review, the group for Mental Health in Children commented, “In general, one thing that you need to improve is the introduction. It could use more explanations especially regarding what insomnia is and how it affects people.” I then went back to revise the introduction to include more background information and explain my topic better. Because of this comment, I decided to also include a brief intro paragraph for the section of the literature review that I was doing which was the effect of lack of sleep in adults. I decided to include background info regarding the studies I was going to talk about to help readers follow along better.
The third learning objective is to negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. I found myself taking different approaches based on the audience I was appealing to. When working on the Children’s book, I made sure to include humor and references to popular video games that children play because that is what I thought to be engaging to the audience my group was writing for. In the book I talked about how a child was staying up to play Need for Speed because videogames are something almost all children can relate to. My literature review however, was catered to adults and college students. In that I talked about emotional bias and attention deficits that come from a lack of sleep because that is what college students are most concerned about. Throughout my projects in this class, i have always tried to answer the question, “ how do i get my audience to care about this.” That guiding question helped me to decide on the tone and wording of all my projects.
The fourth learning objective is to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. While this online semester made collaboration a little hard, we managed to work together on every project. Our group had a group chat where we all constantly sent updates and always replied to anyone with a question. We also held meetings on zoom twice a week to discuss our progress on projects and other class assignments. One of the shining moments of collaboration this semester came from when we were working on the infographic for the public awareness campaign. Venngage did not allow multiple users to work on an infographic at once. To solve this problem, we held a zoom meeting and one member screen shared while doing the infographic while everyone else pitched their ideas and work.
The fifth learning objective is to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. In the articles I worked on for the literature review and other projects, I analyzed how effectively each article tested their hypothesis and how well they explained their results for future implications and possible solutions to the lack of sleep. This is something I explored in almost every project and I even included a blog post about Tips to Sleep Better on our website for the public awareness campaign.
The sixth learning objective is to formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing. When writing dialogue for the children’s book, I wanted to better appeal to our age group of 6-12 year olds. To better engage my audience i included a reference to a racing game that has no age restrictions so help children better relate to the book. Most cases of children delaying going to sleep is because they want to play video games or watch tv. I included, One Sunday night, Sam did not want to sleep but wanted to play Need for Speed.Sam wanted to swerve left and swerve right, but did not want to go goodnight.”
The seventh learning objective is to practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects. For my research I used a multitude of databases including google scholar and the CCNY library. I used the CCNY library database the most because it allowed me to search for articles using keywords. I used works such as “lack of sleep”, “mental health”, and “adults” to better narrow my search parameter. One article that i found especially useful not only on my literature review but for my public awareness campaign that came from the CCNY library with the citation, “Klumpers, U. M. H., Veltman, D. J., van Tol, M.-J., Kloet, R. W., Boellaard, R., Lammertsma, A. A., & Hoogendijk, W. J. G. (2015). Neurophysiological Effects of Sleep Deprivation in Healthy Adults, a Pilot Study. PLoS ONE, 10 (1), 1–16. https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.
cuny.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0116906”.
The last learning objective is to strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources). While working on the literature review, I had to read my sources like I have never done before. I wasn’t reading them for information rather I was reading them to review them and judge their credibility. I also saw that a lot of articles included a “conflict of interest” section that increased the credibility of those articles so I gravitated towards using those articles for my research.
All in all, I believe that I have exceeded all of the learning objectives from this semester of Writing for the Sciences. I improved on my writing, reading, and linguistic skills. I also worked on my reviewing skills for peer reviews for other groups and reviews from other groups also helped my writing skills tremendously.
