An Honest Reflection on My Writing This Semester

This semester’s writing assignments have shown me the aspects of writing that I thrive in and areas that I could work on a little work. Each of this semester’s assignments have taught me something different about my writing. Through these assignments I think I have achieved several course learning objectives, including acknowledging my and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, enhancing my strategies for self-assessment, developing and engaging in the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process, practicing using various library resources and online databases, and strengthening my source use, particularly with citations.

The NYT Summary/Evaluation was one of the easier assignments of the semester. I was already pretty familiar with summarizing readings and I didn’t have too many problems writing the summary, aside from some proofreading errors. It was the evaluation part that I think I struggled with more. Writing the Scholarly Article Analysis challenged me to focus more on discussing how the article was written rather than the content of the article itself. I was more used to examining fictional literature rather than scientific articles, and I hadn’t considered active or passive voices before when evaluating readings. I think writing about how the article was written rather than the content made me appreciate the detail that researchers put into writing their scholarly articles. It helped me appreciate their work from a different perspective. 

While doing the General Audience Paper I felt as though I was challenged to efficiently evaluate the study and translate it into a piece of work that was more generally understandable without summarizing it too much. I really struggled with trying to not summarize the study so much or go too much into the context of what I was trying to discuss. Also, due to the nature of the study, I struggled with talking more about the study since it didn’t require the amount of scientific experimentation as most other studies. At some points I was unsure of what to write about so I felt challenged to write something that was both relevant and significant to the paper. I think I definitely struggled with the presentation portion of the assignment because public speaking is not my strong suit. I feel that in general this paper helped me to enhance my strategies for self-assessment in order to pin down what exactly it was that I found difficult about this paper.  

The lab report and poster was probably one of the easier assignments of the semester, which I think is largely due to the group members I worked with, and I think the biggest example of me engaging in the collaborative and social aspect of the writing processes. All of the group members participated in every part of the assignment; from the survey, to the report, to the poster. I feel very grateful for that, especially since group projects don’t always go well. But since this group of people were very productive, I think we did well on the assignment. We listened to one another and incorporated our different perspectives in order to create work that we were satisfied with submitting. I think being able to discuss our thoughts, not only in this group assignment but also through peer editing, definitely helped me to refine my writing. 

I think I struggled most with the Annotated Bibliography compared to the other writing assignments given this semester. I didn’t completely understand how to create or include my evaluations for each article within the bibliography or how to make each evaluation different from each other, since the articles were pretty similar. Most of the feedback I received on the Annotated Bibliography was regarding the lacking evaluations, which I used to really develop how I wanted to write my literature review. The feedback I received helped me to acknowledge others’ range of linguistic differences as a resource, which I then used to try to improve my writing. The Annotated Bibliography also was a good opportunity for me to practice and familiarize myself with how to navigate using the databases at the CCNY library. Moreover, referencing the articles I found through the CCNY databases also let me practice citations. I’ve never used the CSE citation style before, and even though I used different citation styles before, they were largely citations with quotes. It was challenging to decide whether or not a sentence needed a reference or not, especially when writing the literature review. 

These assignments have helped me achieve several course learning objectives, including acknowledging my and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, enhancing my strategies for self-assessment, developing and engaging in the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process, practicing using various library resources and online databases, and strengthening my source use, particularly with citations. These writing assignments have taught me that I need to improve on aspects like evaluating readings and paying more attention to any proofreading errors I might have. It has also taught me the importance of proper citations and peer interaction to improve my writing. I’m very grateful for the experiences I had in this class with my writing and I hope that I can continue to improve.