Christian Xu

Professor Zayas

Reflective Self-Assessment

4/20/23

Some aspects in which I have engaged in the collaborative aspects of the writing process is through group projects. My experience with working together in a group with unfamiliar classmates was challenging and somewhat irritating. For instance, when working on the first group project, there was little to no communication and planning within our group on deciding when we were going to collectively work on the project. For the second group project, the Laboratory Simulation, no communication was present before the due date of the project. We did not even have an objective in mind for what our experiment was going to test. I ended up laying out the entire experiment myself and performing all the experiments and data collection. This uncollaborative behavior within the group ended up persisting throughout all three group projects where we would start and finish the project at the last minute on the day it was due. The workload distribution and disparity between each group member was also extremely prominent. I strongly feel that only one other group member and myself contributed an even workload for each group project. This became noticeably apparent when one of my group members decided to leave the course the day before presentations were meant to take place. At the time, hearing this news didn’t have any negative impact on the progress of our project because they contributed little to no work on the previous projects as well. For the last project, once again, one other group member and myself put in all the workload. They worked hard on writing the paper while I created the majority of the presentation slides. The third group member wasn’t present at all to help and had shown no communication or intention that they wanted to help.

Throughout this course I reemphasized on my researching skills especially pertaining to the college’s online library database. In my previous writing class last semester, FIQWS Scientific World, I had multiple lab sessions which allowed us to utilize the library database. We explored databases such as ECHOST and JSTOR. However, I didn’t rely on these databases for previous semesters’ research as significantly as I did for this semester. 

This semester I strengthened my use of sources by practicing and completing various writing assignments that required the reading and analysis of scientific journals. For instance, the literature review was similar to a miniature full fledged research paper. The parallel between these two assignments was that they both required an argument or thesis on a specific topic of your choice. Thesis crafting was one of the major aspects of the writing process that I’d learned in last semesters’ writing class was how to formulate a proper thesis. As a result, I was able to easily translate this writing process into the work that I did for this semester’s class. In addition, both the literature review and final research paper required the analysis and interpretation of evidence from scientific articles to support your argument. The annotated bibliographies were like practice assignments to help improve upon my analysis skills of varying sources and to prepare for the final research paper. They were beneficial for better understanding the scientific text before jumping into the final paper. The process of writing a summary after reading the text was a better way of grasping the details of the evidence than simply skimming the text and writing about it immediately afterward. At the beginning of the semester I felt a lack of confidence with reading dense scientific research. Evaluating the information was especially difficult due to the scientific jargon and the detailed explanations of the experiments within the paper. However, as I worked through the course assignments I felt a clear improvement in my writing ability. 

This semester we engaged in many course reading assignments and discussions. For instance, in the first group project we had to collectively read a difficult scientific paper and tried to decipher the premise or objective of the text. We also answered discussion board posts based on the summary of these readings. Collectively these activities helped promote and develop our reading skills. We were able to derive the important aspects of the text and minimize confusion with the parts that had excessive scientific jargon. When working through major assignments such as the literature review and the final research paper the class engaged in peer-review. The peer-review process focused on the revisions of the rough drafts only. That way there was still room to change and edit our papers before submitting the final drafted version. The peer-review process is a extremely overlooked aspect of the writing process and it allows others to provide you with insight and advice on how your work can be improved. When writing a paper you can become so focused and dead set on what you think is the best method of answering the assignment without hearing out a second opinion. However, the peer-review process helps bring in new ideas that you hadn’t considered. Moreover, these ideas could also be a drastic improvement to the quality of your work. Through peer-review I was also able to acquaint myself with a variety of writing styles that my classmates possessed. For instance, on a specific in-class writing assignment we had to interpret a piece of scientific text that had a substantial amount of jargon. Everyone had their own unique interpretation of what the text was trying to portray. No two students had the same analysis or summary despite reading the same text.

This particular writing course focuses on the analysis of nonfiction scientific literature. Many of the classwork and discussion board posts require the understanding and summarization of scientific text. For the group projects, Jargon to Translation and Lab Report, the former required the explanation and analyzed summary of a complicated scientific journal, while the later required us to write a lab report in the scientific format, IMRaD.

At the start of the semester I had set the goal of being more comfortable with reading long scientific papers by the end of the course. I also wanted to improve upon the overall flow and structure of my writing. To achieve this goal I practiced choosing and analyzing the best evidence that supported my argument and building on these ideas with my own interpretations. At the end of the semester I felt I had achieved the goals I had wanted to accomplish.