Participating in a writing for sciences course has helped me acknowledge my weaknesses and enhance my strengths. There are several skills that I have gained throughout each assignment. Through working with my peers in order to give and gain constructive feedback, I learned the social aspect of the writing process. Although I have had experiences in collaboration before, in this class with my informative paper in particular, I was surprised to see how many different perceptions each student had with my writing, to some it seemed like I was making a stance, others agreed on it being biased but unclear with certain information. It made me aware of my audience and helped me assess myself and correct areas of my writing by making clear statements or elaborating further. Once I looked at my paper from a reader’s point of view, I understood that I had the tendency to skip over certain topics after a brief insight, assuming that the reader would share my perspective and understand the message. Working with peers also exposed me to a variety of linguistic abilities, the tone and writing style of each paper I read was unique, each person found a different way to word their sentences, despite some of them having the same topic and having the same goal in terms of the assignment. This was especially clear when working on the collaborative research paper, where we had to keep a good flow between all of our sections and communicate our ideas to ensure that we are on the same page.

As a freshman carrying memories from high school, I had to make a lot of changes in the steps I take in order to write a paper and conduct research. Before, reading the description of an assignment, using google to search for websites ending with .org, .gov, .edu, etc, and rushing straight into writing was acceptable. In this class we primarily used databases and peer reviewed texts as resources for our paper, with some appearance of sources from the web that served well for background information. As a writer, using proper sources for my papers enhances my credibility to my readers, this became one of my strengths. From the writing process, I learned that a plan or an outline of some sort was significant before jumping into the writing itself, there were weakly online discussions relating to a future assignment, when it was time to begin writing, all the clarifications, examples, and pieces of the writing would be ready to implement into the writing. This saves more time, makes the writing more organized, and makes the overall process less stressful because there is nothing sudden or new to understand when the writing begins.

Another skill that I gained was analytical, with the rhetorical paper I learned to focus on finding one piece of information at a time by separately analyzing every section. I thought about why the author thought to word something the way they did or why they thought including certain information was necessary. Analyzing a text in pieces makes paraphrasing and the understanding of the paper more organized and helps to make the information you gain less vague. I think I would have made further improvements if I applied myself better in terms of attending each class and dedicated more time into participating in every online discussion. Overall, my experience gained from this course will be helpful in my academics.