To view in original format click link Writer’s Reflection
Dear Professor Jane,
In the spirit of “Respice, Aspice, Prospice”, as I reflect on the spring semester and my journey as writer, another Latin quote comes to mind, “Semper Idem”. It means always the same. To say that this semester, or should I say the year 2020, has been full of plot twists, surprises and frights is an understatement. During these turbulent times, I find tremendous comfort in the fact that my last writing assignment in “Writing for the Sciences” is similar to the first, as they are both letters. I have a newfound gratitude for things that remain constant.
Although I entered the semester with enthusiasm for writing because it is one of the few creative outlets, I have in the Sophie Davis curriculum. I was not expecting the opportunity to become more creative in my writing. Through Professor Jane’s encouragement to add images, format, and be more descriptive, being more expressive and inventive with my writing became possible. This is something that I was not particularly expecting from a class called “Writing for the Sciences.” Scientific literature on the other hand is something I was totally expecting to read in this class, but I could not imagine how much respect I would have for peer reviewed articles and the science section of the New York Times. After recently re-reading my formal letter of introduction, I can see that from the first week in the semester I was already crossing off course objectives such as the first part of Course Objective 3, which includes determining your writing goals. One of my goals for the semester included learning “how to analyse scientific papers to get the maximum amount of valuable information from them.”
Starting with something small that I have struggled with throughout this semester is spelling the word “writing”. For some reason I prefer spelling it with two “T’s”, perhaps it is because I have come to learn about the importance of writing and that I feel it deserves an extra letter. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t pay much attention to spelling and grammar in my ESL (English as a Second Language) classes in 3rd and 4th grade. Since I was able to converse with my peers and teachers in English, I undervalued the writing and grammatical skills that I was supposed to be acquiring. Even when the ESL teachers set up fun activities such as making popcorn from scratch around Thanksgiving, there was a part of me that wanted to be like the “regular kids” who didn’t have to learn the restrictive rules of English. Now fast forward to the first day of the spring semester as I confidently label my notebook for “Writing for the Sciences” with my favorite 0.5 blue/green Muji pen. I had no idea I was making my first “typo” in this class. Funny enough, it was my friend Angelica who would also turn out to be my peer review partner for most of the semester, that pointed out my first mistake. Soon after came one of the earliest class activities which in which Professor Jane passed around a New York Times newspaper, and asked us if we could identify the typo. Those little spelling errors are how I started focusing on the 2nd Course Objective, which includes revising and editing. From this moment on I realized the importance of seemingly small details, and how they are actually quite influential to how one’s writing is understood. Up until then I thought that when it concerned writing, conveying the main idea and overall message was paramount. Getting bogged down in the details was never really a priority of mine, until beginning “Writing for the Sciences”, which motivated me to be more specific and detail oriented in my writing.
This goal of becoming familiar with reading and searching for “scientific papers” as I called them, was achieved through reading the peer-reviewed articles in the course packet and using the CCNY database. The attention that Professor Jane placed on having us name the authors and the titles of these articles, highlights the value of these peer reviewed articles, and has given me a new goal of aspiring to be an author or co-author of a peer-reviewed journal. During the writing process of the Scientific Rhetorical Analysis paper, the use of the SWALEs method helped me read the peer-reviewed article with more ease, otherwise it would have seemed to be very dense to me. The Scientific Rhetorical Analysis helped me achieve the 7th Course Objective which is about the use of CCNY’s library resources and online databases. Back when I took ESL classes, I would follow my non-ESL classmates to the playground instead of going to the ESL class to get ahead on some reading. This was not in my best interest academically. Now that I have enjoyed reading scientific articles about climate change, I can say that I am proud that my attitude about reading has changed. As a result of reading the New York Times articles, my summarizing skills which is part of Course Objective 8, have improved as well. I realized this when I was reading the article “A Crisis Right Now: San Francisco and Manila Face Rising Seas” by Somini Sengupta for the New York Times Response. This article was soooooooo long, but it also compared the environmental crisis of flooding in different countries in a really intriguing manner. Having the task of briefly summarizing the article made me read it more methodically and taught me to keep an eye out for how different topics within the article all connected. It turns out that in my formal letter of introduction I had written about my interest in climate change which turned out to be the subject matter of my favorite New York Times article I read this semester. It seems like my Letter of Introduction was quite prophetic.
I now realize how strong of a foundation earlier assignment such as the Letter of Introduction and the Questionnaire were in terms of paving the way for my growth in the Writing for the Sciences class.
Unlike the times during the 3rd and 4th grade when I was sometimes distant towards my ESL class friends, “Writing for the Sciences” has been a time when the English language has brought me closer to my friends. Back in middle school the pressure to conform is the reason that I didn’t spend that much time with my fellow ESL friends. Now, many years later I see that a language barrier is a difference that united ESL kids and it is something that I should have celebrated. At least the adventures that I have had with my friends courtesy of “Writing for the Sciences”, make up for the 3rd and 4th grade. This collaboration with classmates is present in class assignments such as the Powers of Observation essay for which we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the many prompts that required taking pictures or selfies. This allowed me to fulfil the collaborative requirements of Course Objective 5. The satisfaction of being in part of the Shakespearean Beavers is a feeling I can keep for life.
Through peer-reviews, I have been given the opportunity to create relationships with peers that DO in fact lead to my academic improvement, as opposed to how things were in elementary school. Through the Letter of Introduction (which I did not realize was going to be so impactful), is how I learned from my peer review partner’s specific and humorous writing style, and how I could use that in my own writing to make to make it more distinct, and showcase creativity. I still remember that when I was reading Angelica’s Letter of Introduction I chuckled when she referred to Suriname, where she’s from, as “the home-country.” This was such a wholesome and “Angelica” way of describing where she’s from, and it made me realize that putting my personality into what I am writing is something I should strive to do. Now between Jenann, Angelica, and I “home-country” has become an inside joke with proud roots in the “Writing for the Sciences” class. This all also happens to fulfil the 1st Course Objective of “acknowledging your classmates and your one language differences as a resource.” Proof of Angelica’s wit is one of her constructive criticisms that I should add a pun.
The use of visuals has not only been useful for collaborating with classmates, but it has been another mode of expression to include in my writing that I learned this semester, thanks to Course Objective 6. Previously I was not aware of the necessity of visuals in writing. To me it seemed like once we were done reading picture-books in elementary school illustrations and other visuals were mysteriously banned from appearing in works of writing. I have now learned that this is definitely NOT the case with writing. When I considered my audience as a key component in the Powers of Observation essay, the use of visuals was one of the most important things. Besides the obviously necessary visuals of the museum artefacts, I included pictures of pop culture references that my audience of 8th graders would know. This made the writing process more enjoyable to me, because sometimes words can only go so far and that “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Regarding Course Objective 4 which concerns my stance through and in my writing, I realize that I specifically need to reflect upon my personal writing habits and “rituals”. When I am writing an essay, I always have to outline what I’m going to do which is basically typing out how I am going to fulfil the assignment requirements. This gets me to start writing by starting in the shallow end instead of jumping straight into the deep end. It also helps me not procrastinate since I know that at the very least, I have started my writing assignment. Outlining is the most important parts of my writing process, because that’s when I decide what I am actually going to do for an assignment. This is something I do sitting on my desk, often while drinking a cup of tea after dinner, with music from my random Spotify playlist (which ranges from Adele to the Hamilton Soundtrack). When I write my outline, I try to keep the “Shitty First Draft” handout in mind and tell myself that anything goes. Once I get the outline out of the way, the drafting process is something that I do to basically fill out my outline and get more descriptive. I’ll split my screen in half, so that I can work on the draft while looking at the outline. Since my outlines are never really full-proof , drafting is not always as effortless as I want it to be. I like putting as much work into the draft as possible so that I can revise it and add suggestions in a relaxed manner with music in the background once again.
Now that my writing process is known to all I can get into my stance on writing which I think is sprinkled across everything I write. Here goes, “ My stance on writing is to first and foremost TRY to achieve the goal of writing out whatever you set out to write. Once you get the barebones down you can always build up from there. It’s okay to take a couple of detours as long as you reach your writing destination.” Thanks to Course Objective 9, the digital portfolio is a place where all can find my “Writing Stance” through what I have written in the “Writing for the Sciences”course.
The writing assignment that showcases my growth the most while still pointing out what I still have to improve upon my Scientific Controversy Paper entitled “Got Milk? But What Kind?”. Here is a paragraph in this essay that changed dramatically from the draft to the final product. The changes that I made to the final draft include the addition of more details and context. From the beginning of my writing journey in this class adding specific details is something that I have always
struggled to do, it’s something that I need to check-in and remind myself about. Here in this essay I wrote about two scientists that my essay addressed, and while I knew about the scientists because I had to research them, I failed to recognize that my audience would also need some background information on them.
Thanks to Professor Jane’s comments that pointed out the fact that I needed more detail, I was able to add fix this.
What I appreciate the most about Professor Jane’s constructive criticism is that it focuses on the entire essay as a whole, as well as the individual parts of the essay, so that both the big-picture of the essay and the individual paragraphs both function effectively. I am proud of the thorough background research that I did for this paper, and in the future, I’ll make it a priority to keep in mind that “the devil’s in the details.”
Looking beyond the major writing assignments such as the essay, I began to see that smaller writing assignments which became more frequent after the transition to online classes also had an impact on my writing. Since summarizing or referring to articles was a major component of these articles, I soon learned that some technical things about referring to articles were not yet ingrained in me. ALWAYS remembering to name the authors and the title of the article seems obvious, but when getting caught up in answering an interesting prompt they are easy to forget. The discussion board prompts helped me realize that no detail is too small, and that the title and author of an article are very important to remember. The experience of writing the diary was different, because in my academic writing I enjoy outlining what the assignment requires of me and then gradually adding details. With the diary this is not something I was able to do, because a diary is more of an outpour of a stream of consciousness. Instead of planning out steps I would just have to sit in front of my laptop for a while and let the words and thoughts come to me. Sometimes it took longer, I then realized that it is far easier for me to get writer’s block when I have a larger range of topics to write about. I learned that the diary entry is something that I cannot always complete in one sitting, so I would split it up into giving myself some time to write things down in the evening. Then in the morning I would be able to revise or add anything I felt was necessary.
ALL IN ALL, I see that not only have I grown from a “shallower” writer who didn’t dive too much into details to a now more descriptive writer, I have also grown as a reader from my time as an ESL student. Reading my reflection from my very first assignment where I wrote that my goal is to add specific details to my writing, I realize that I have actually known what I needed to improve upon from the beginning of this class.
Unfortunately, I still type with a lot of typos and misspelled “writing” almost every time in this letter. As they say “Bad-Habits Die Hard”. But that can always be a goal for my next writing class. My past reluctance to spend time writing and reading during my elementary school days, has made me more excited about it now. Having to learn how to write English and knowing that it was something that I was not always excited about learning, makes me proud to know that it is something I have improved upon. Now I realize that once I get into medical school writing essays is something that I will miss. I’m glad that I learned about different forms of scientific writing this semester so I know that I can KEEP ON WRITING. Thank You So Much Professor Jane Bolster for being such a wonderful teacher and inspiring me too keep on writing.
Sincerely and Thank You,
Johanna Tamoka
