This here is a reflection of how this course has helped me further evolve my writing. It highlights notable assignments that I felt were crucial in my growth in this course and as an overall writer.

Sophia Rosario

Dr. Leslie Carpenter 

English 21003

15 May 2024

At the beginning of the semester, my writing was in a place where it read robotically and it didn’t incorporate data appropriately. My writing has strengths such as its rhetoric and the analysis was easy to comprehend. However, this didn’t make my faults overlookable, but fulfilling this course’s learning objectives improved my abilities as an author overall improving my scientific writing. 

At the start of the semester, I must admit that when I first started the course, I didn’t even consider that articles aimed at different audiences used different linguistics. Of course, that meant I didn’t know how to recognize different rhetorics and the different types of languages being used. However, this was corrected when I first had to do my research for the assigned PSA Project. During my research, I had to be mindful of the type of language used in the assigned articles that we had to read and identify the kind of audience the author was aiming for. This was my introduction to scientific writing and how I started to understand rhetoric. That taught me that the vocabulary used in scientific articles can affect how accessible the information is, making it an essential part of educating certain audiences. After all the research, then I and three of my peers had to put together a PSA video that would bring awareness to a sustainability issue and in turn promote a group whose main goal is to address that said issue. Our first draft of this PSA video was closer to a presentation than a public service announcement. We received a hefty amount of constructive criticism and we essentially missed the mark. Most of that criticism touched on the fact that there was too much content and it was hard to comprehend. After that, we all collectively edited the video into a more concise and digestible format. That whole experience was enlightening and I managed to further develop my rhetorical sensibility. 

After the PSA video assignment, we were assigned to write an argumentative position paper about a sustainability topic of our choice. The ultimate goal of the paper was to write a paper that would convince people like the local governments to provide funding to the campaign or sustainability problem of our choosing. This assignment made me hone in on the type of rhetoric that I needed to convey due to the fact that the assignment gave me a specific demographic that I had to address. I essentially had to figure out how to present the Clean Energy and Environment Protection Plan in an effective way that would entice people to invest in their campaign. I found the task at hand a little challenging since all of the previous argumentative essays that I have written in the past were information-based and depended on the information gathered to do most of the persuading. However, I adjusted my approach and introduced the paper with the Climat Clock in Union Square. Then, the content of the paper was made up of the benefits the campaign would have on the environment and the information needed to support them. Overall, the position paper helped me grasp the concept of addressing specific audiences and also helped me improve my written rhetoric.

Finally, the last major assignment that I felt helped the quality of my writing improve was the research proposal. This assignment had two major parts that I feel challenged me the most. The first was the fact that I had to find a topic and had to find a niche that could potentially provide grounds for any additional research. To find my subject and my niche, I had to do some heavy research, and that required reading a lot of academic articles that were very information-dense. This posed quite a challenge for me because these articles were talking about things I couldn’t easily understand. However, I’m grateful for the struggle because I managed to develop strategies on how to read academic sources effectively, and due to this assignment I’m now able to use databases and effectively process and use the information one can gather from them.

All in all, over the course of the semester this class has challenged my writing in multiple ways. This course has pushed me to improve on my weaknesses regarding science writing which has led me to improve my abilities in analysis, reading comprehension, and linguistics. This course has also taught me immensely about sustainability and has left me informed on how we can all make efforts to better our environment.