Suraiya Anisa

The City College of New York

ENGL 21003: Writing for the Sciences

Professor Slentz

14 December 2022

My writing process prior to entering the class consisted of writing a paper in one sitting with no drafts. I would strictly answer all of the prompts when writing for an assignment. This is something I intended to change at the start of the semester. I wanted to write a paper that flowed well and wasn’t your standard five-paragraph recipe. I learned the value of a draft and peer revision after our first writing piece, a formal letter of introduction. The peer revisions aided in instilling confidence in my work. The positive and constructive feedback had given me an idea of how well or poorly written it was. When I was writing my final draft, I knew what I needed to fix because of the comments made by my peers.

The scientific rhetorical analysis and the scientific controversy paper were the assignments that I struggled with the most. It was difficult to identify the author, setting, and purpose for the rhetorical analysis, and many inferences had to be made based on context clues in the scientific report. Furthermore, because there were multiple theses, identifying the major one in the report was challenging. Not to mention that some of the information was redundant because the author, text, purpose, and setting are all linked together. I am more confident in writing a rhetorical analysis. I can improve even more by practicing identifying the rhetorical situation in any piece of text I come across. As for the scientific controversy paper, I wanted to write about something I was interested in: nutrition. I chose my topic because, as a child, I never really understood nutrition until high school. However, this was a very heavy topic to cover because many social factors are to blame for this problem. For this assignment, I learned that it is critical to be interested in your writing.

Overall, the papers assigned to us taught me a lot. I grew stronger at recognizing language, purpose, audience, and citations. The language used had to be appropriate for the intended audience. For example, because the target audience for the scientific controversy paper was children, I explained nutrition in a very simple manner. I’ve learned to structure the paper based on my purpose, whether it’s to inform or persuade the audience. This entailed taking into account the length, format, style, tone, and content. Furthermore, when considering the audience, I made certain that I told them everything they needed to know as well as everything I wanted them to know. Finally, I have improved in citing, which include the title page, abstract, and references. Although I have previously done citations, I have never done so in APA format. This new skill will be useful when I write other scientific papers, which I expect to do frequently as a biology major.