Oluwaseyitan Rufai

My perceptions of writing have changed a lot during this semester. This semester I learned the different styles and writing methods that scientist use when writing papers. We did many assignments this semester that allowed to us see what scientist do when they are writing journals. I think the group lab report project we did really helped me refine my scientific writing for other classes like physics and chemistry. Having to design our own lab and that write out the introduction, methods, procedure, and conclusion. When we were writing the lab report we had to use different writing strategies for each part of the assignment. The introduction and the conclusion required totally different writing strategies to be written correctly. I also think my vocabulary for my science papers has improved tremendously. Before I had taken this class my style of writing was extremely casual and lackadaisical. I now realize that I need to use different tones for writing depending on what type of piece I was writing. Throughout the course of this semester, I believe many of my strength’s surrounding the course learning objectives improved tremendously. When we did the group lab report and group poster project, we had to use the first learning outcome to complete the assignment. My group members had very different writing styles than me. We had to work as a team to fulfill the requirements of the assignments. We also had to use the second-course learning objective throughout the course of the semester when we had to peer review our articles. I found myself taking the notes that the reviewers gave me and changing the article depending on what I thought would be best. We also had to use the last course learning objective for most of the papers when we were making our work cited pages. I learned how to use different styles like APA and CSE when formatting my work cited page which I had never used before. The fourth learning objective which was about celebrating writing styles was also used a lot in this class. This relates heavily to the instances when we used the first learning outcome. We used this learning outcome when we were writing the written part of the group lab report. My group members and had to meet various times in the library to talk about how we were going to approach and execute our project. Another skill of mine that has also improved thoroughly out the course of the year was taking a firm stance and sticking to it for the entirety of the essay. In High-school my teachers always said that it was better to have a more general essay that covered a variety of topics. After doing assignments like the literary review and the annotated bibliography I have realized that this is actually not true. If you try to cover to many topics in one essay it takes away from the main purpose of the essay. This can also be hard for the reader because covering all of those topics can be confusing for them to comprehend. The annotated bibliography and literary review also helped me refine the skills related to the seventh-course learning objective. When we were creating out annotated bibliography, we had to use accredited articles only. I have never used websites like google scholar and pub med before this class so being exposed to it was a completely new experience for me.