“My first year of college was supposed to be nothing other than challenging. Yes, I knew that but I never would have expected to be able to keep up with my day to day homework while there are 100’s of dead bodies being shoved in truck freezers just miles away. The challenge I am facing this school year is not bred out of hate for my academics or pure laziness. I just can’t seem to focus on an assignment or a test when I know the war that humanity is fighting right now.” This is a part of a journal that I had written in the past couple of months, something that I keep looking back at now that we have reached the end of the semester because I can’t believe how far I’ve come as a student and as a writer even in the midst of such tragedy. This semester of 2020 has been filled with crazy loopholes and crushing deadlines and frankly, I can’t believe we are finally at the end of it, but like many things that come to an end, good or bad you’re kinda sad to watch it go and that’s just how I feel about this class. Writing for the sciences has taught me more about my own writing in a couple of months of me taking this class than I have learned in the past 14 years of school I have experienced.
One of the main things that I felt were my biggest flaws in writing before entering this class was disorganization and a lack of passion. But I can confidently say that I feel as if I have improved tremendously in these areas with the help of the weekly 400 word responses and the essays we had to do. Given the opportunity to voice my own opinions and the freedom to proceed in any fashion I liked really opened my eyes to how important it is to try and make any piece of writing your own. Even if we aren’t allowed to give our opinions it’s always best to try and make the piece of writing something you’re proud to call yours. This is something that I felt helped me solve my lack of passion when writing. As I stated in a reflective response I wrote about my favorite types of writing “I felt like I really thrived in this assignment because I was able to put my own personal touch to it.” This really stuck with me throughout the whole semester because as time went by, I noticed how particularly true this was, it doesn’t matter what you’re writing about as long as you’re putting a piece of yourself in it you’ll always have something to fuel your passion. That’s something that I felt I had been given the chance to explore in this class, which is the freedom in writing. From the weekly reflections to the Coronavirus journals I was freely writing without any restraints and that’s when I noticed, not many classes were asking students about their opinions on this epidemic we are living through and just the simple act of having the freedom to express yourself in such a devastating time allowed me to see how important it is to always have a free space to voice your thoughts.
This also helped me with my disorganization issue because once I understood that writing is a way to express oneself it guided me through the process of how I want to come across to my readers. It helped me clarify the importance of understanding who your audience is in order to organize my thoughts and proceed. This can be seen in my literature review essay. The difference between the first draft and the final draft is drastic, I go from just stating the topic to actually reviewing the article “Since 2003 when social media really became popular about 30% of the sites users spent more than 15 hours per week online with this number steadily increasing” “In the article “Social Media and Adolescent wellbeing” by Paul Best and Brian Taylor they explain how in our new generation we are starting to push our youth into a more digital world which is starting to leave an impact on our future generation.” In my first draft, I was completely lost in following the instructions and identifying my audience, I was writing about my topic and not the actual articles themselves. But over time after much-needed peer reviews and self-reflection, I noticed that I was sticking to only talking about the topic and nothing else. But this method wasn’t going to work on this paper, so after hours of rewrites and planning, I noticed that I was missing one of the main things which is a voice. A voice to establish what my mission in this paper will be and what I wanted my audience to be thinking while reading this. In the end, I liked to say I completed the assessment as best as I could and am happy with the end result much like many of my other pieces of writing for this class.
Overall I know I still have a lot of work to get done before I can officially call myself a great writer, like fixing my grammar mistakes and working on citing a quote correctly but in the end, I’m happy with the new ways of approaching a writing assignment that I’m leaving with from this class. I’m not only leaving this class a better writer but also in a better mindset because it has proven to me how even in the worst of times writing will always be there to help express what you can’t say out loud and that’s one of the most important things I feel I have learned from this class. I was taught more about myself and my writing taking this class then I have in all my life and I’m so thankful I got to experience it.
