To say that I succeeded with the course learning outcomes wouldn’t be too accurate, as it’s very difficult to manage all the aspects of the writing process. I can confidently say that I tried, though. Each subsequent writing piece was an attempt to improve on the previous one, and I hope my drafting process reflects that. The first course learning outcome, acknowledging linguistic differences as resources, and drawing on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibilities, is a mouthful. I noticed my classmates wrote formally or informally at times, and rather than depending on their writing capabilities, it was defined primarily by situation and audience. At times it was necessary to be rigid in writing, like in the literature review and my survey of hyperhidrosis and my topic. At other times, my voice was what mattered most like in the introductory letter. Managing both sides of the coin was a difficult balancing act. Even my formatting would change depending on the type of paper. I distinctly separated the literature review paper into parts and tried to be completely objective. While I was criticized for splitting the paper into sections, I felt that without trying it out I wouldn’t learn if it was a good strategy or bad strategy. Making attempts to try different writing styles was important to me. As a result, however, my writing seemed a little too detached, which was also a criticism of mine. Despite that, I used a wide variety of sources to get as much valuable information as possible. I went through a ton of databases that were relevant to my topic, went through both surgical and wet lab journals, and synthesized the information I found as best as I could. 

To my detriment, I’ve always been a rather independent writer. I felt that my writing could be best improved by reading good writing and trying to emulate it; to an extent it has. However, I forgot the value of good criticism from both my peers and my professor. I also learned the value of a good draft. Over the course of the semester my drafts became more involved. It’s often the case that when you have a draft to write without strict regulations, students get into the habit of writing a cursory draft with a couple sources to get by through the day. I felt it was a disservice to my classmates as well as to myself and devoted a lot of energy to the following drafts. Learning the difference between what I wanted to say and what the audience needed to hear was the most important lesson I learned over the semester and still is the hardest to implement. Peer revisions with my classmates and bouncing my ideas off them helped me maintain a spotlight on the issues I really wanted to address in the time I had. 

A personal goal that I met was actively reading and engaging in the material. The class is called writing for the sciences, but before becoming a better writer you need to become a better reader. We were exposed to many articles, some of them good and some of them bad, and being able to determine what qualities good writing possesses versus bad was an important skill that I hadn’t developed until now. Reading all those articles for the scientist profile, the literature review, and the research paper has made me both a faster reader and writer. There used to be a time when reading scientific articles was extremely confusing to me, but once you gain experience in it, the process becomes faster with increased clarity. Each article that I cited in the literature review I gave a decent read, but some of them had more pertinent information than others. Being able to verify the validity of a paper and pick out the important information is something that I managed to learn how to do. On the other hand, using too many sources takes the voice out of your own writing, something my intro letter had a lot of that I lost over the semester. I hope the research paper manages to show some of my own ideas as it is the culmination of the work done this semester. I believe that the reflections for each paper and this self-assessment show that I’ve tried to become better as a student and writer in the time I had. I don’t intend to quit writing though I may pursue science, as I said once before in a discussion post: if you can’t write, your thoughts get trapped in your mind no matter how much you want to share them.