Coming into this semester and taking “Writing for Sciences”, I already felt that I was proficient in college-level academic writing because of the years I’ve spent in college and in my high school curriculum honing it. Moreover, I felt that, even on a creative and, albeit, personal level, I was a fairly decent writer because I had been writing a lot for myself by reflecting on my emotions in a journal, making poems, or even just stating things I was grateful for at the end of the day. This was learned through my studies of Psychology, more specifically Positive Psychology, where they showed how “gratitude journals” help improve mental health by allowing one to easily process difficult emotions with tangible words on a screen or on paper. So, I wasn’t short of a confident writer when I first began this course.
However, in this course, I learned that there was a specific way to write when it comes to science articles like the rhetorical analysis paper, literature review paper, and even the public awareness campaign project that we did in this class. Honestly, for the first few assignments, I had to learn and keep learning what it meant to “write for sciences”. I understood that with my background of writing, I felt like I was decent, but it was still challenging. This can be seen with my first draft of my “Rhetorical Analysis” assignment where I created a super bloated and unnecessary introduction talking about sex, but my project, in the end, barely would’ve talked about it:
“Sex, despite being a natural process of life, is rarely discussed. Due to the influence of pornography, sex has been bastardized, leading some people to believe this is what real intimacy looks like. This sex addiction has only skyrocketed with the introduction of dating apps like Tinder, which are used to find ‘hook ups’.” is an excerpt from the “shitty first draft”.
However, it’s these same faults that helped me learn how to draft, revise, and edit these types of science-based papers. For drafting, I learned how to just write and create a “shitty first draft” by letting out all my thoughts on the page and see where it would lead me. While now I think the sentence above was bloated, I know now that it was necessary to write this draft where I just let out every thought so that I can easily edit out unnecessary bloated material. It let me focus on what was important, which was actually talking about how the pandemic changed online dating culture, not sex:
“The modern day rise of the pornography industry and sex work or even the existence of religious restrictions have led to sex addiction among young adults. However, since conversations revolving sex are often seen as taboo or indecent, there are rarely any studies trying to understand which factors cause sex addiction.” is the new introduction in the finalized version of the Rhetorical Analysis assignment.
I learned how to revise and edit those papers by making sure I understand the specific audience that I was trying to attract or the way that the paragraphs are formatted (if each paragraph were the same theme/topic). Through this process, I was allowed to clearly understand and communicate clearly to an audience based on what genres, medium, or even rhetorical situation. This translated into how I decided to approach the Public Awareness Campaign project. Despite all the data and the statistics, when people hear stories from the person that are either personal or relatable (or both), it allows them to connect to it more. That’s why I decided to take time during my presentation to talk about what I experienced during COVID-19 to let them relate. In a personal way, it allowed me to talk about what I experienced and express it to people, letting my experiences be real to some extent and validated. I always thought communicating that was very important.
When it comes to genre analysis and the multimodal composition experience in this class, it was most evident when it came to my understanding of how the Rhetorical Analysis assignment worked. Even then, I was still figuring out what determined an effective Rhetorical Analysis since it was my first time analyzing just the “rhetorical terms”, like the rhetorical situation, genre, etc. and whether or not an article effectively used those for an entire paper. However, through the lessons and the articles we read in class, I definitely understood how to analyze genre and medium and their purposes for the entire article, evidenced when I stated:
“It is important to understand that the Journal of Behavioral Addictions is a scientific community focused on behavioral addictions, and through this, you can understand the audience, because it focused the targeted audience to people who are meant to see this article naturally, like members of the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, unless someone actively looks for it. Thus, it can be interpreted that this article is not necessarily for the average person, despite the information being important for the average person.” in the Rhetorical Analysis assignment.
As for the multimodal composition aspect, it was definitely a fun challenge after learning all of the importance of each rhetorical term along with how to work it with a Public Awareness Campaign from the article Stop Raising Awareness Already. Splitting up the work into the skills your group has is important for time management and making sure, after everything is done, that it is polished.
Engaging in peer reviewing was a rewarding experience as well. Learning through what other people do felt important and allowed me to learn what I wanted to do as well as with the websites: “ Add a “about the creators” page along with the organization name somewhere.” It was also similar to find out what wasn’t effective for my type of medium or genre like with this: “The conclusion does answer the same reason above. There seems to be so much more to write about, and within those, you can focus more on what specifics about human life in space you’d like to talk about.” where I detailed how the conclusion should be more specific to answering the question of their entire Literary Review Assignment/or the idea it was based on.
In the end, I thoroughly believe that this class was incredibly valuable because of my new journey as a writer, in a personal way, and even with my academic writing, which it only improved upon. The experience of creating a website, organization, and even presenting the whole idea to the group of people that I hoped would be interested in was exciting and I definitely will build upon the research I’ve already done here. Even if it was a course presentation and not an actual organization presentation, I still felt it was incredibly valuable with how much I learned from it.
