Self-Assessment Paper

The course Writing for the Sciences was an ideal class for my development as a writer. From my perspective, and at the end of each reflection in blackboard, the idea that I was making some substantial progress as a writer stood with me until this very last moment. From the start, the professor acknowledged the expectations and the course learning outcomes on the first day of class. Therefore, after a careful reflection, I feel that I have addressed the following course learning outcomes that in general help me out to improve my writing, reading, drafting, analytical, collaborative and source searching skills. It is evident that for x or y reason I did not have enough experience and time to tackle each one of the CLO’s. However, in each one of the sections, I describe in more detail why I feel this to be the case, and I explain a plan of action that I will try to implement in the future.

 – Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibilities. This course learning outcome was one of the most difficult ones to tackle. However, I feel confident about the fact that I made some progress. Over our time in class, we created four different essays that vary from stance, genres and rhetorical situations. The first essay was an Introductory letter. The essay required to familiarize the reader (Prof. Grove) with the brief history of our background, our goals, and intentions at CCNY, as well as things that we plan to do shortly. At the start, writing my thoughts down on paper seemed to be an impossible challenge. This is the case because, whenever I write an essay I visualize plenty of ways to write it, but in the end, I finish with a weird structure and not deepen into the assignment goals. In the first place, the only audience that I had in mind was Prof. Grove because I thought of this task as a presentation letter, introducing myself and goals. Therefore, I decided to narrate a personal story to enhance the teacher’s understanding of how important education is and my desire to complete my personal goals.
Consequently, I try to provide in-depth explanations regarding the why of such decisions hoping that this information in connection with the story could make my reader relate even more, and give a natural flow within the letter. Another piece of evidence from my interaction with this CLO is found in my literature review paper. The literature of nomophobia is scarce. Moreover, during the readings, I saw many evident patterns in the conversation of the topic. However, I also found inconsistencies in the data, definitions, methods, and some sort of bias. But, those things pushed me to build my literature review around those patterns and flaws to let know the readers about the topic in general with a neutral stance. I tried to be as impartial as I could. That contributed to the analysis and crafting of my essay.
Nevertheless, at the moment of writing those things I had problems trying to organize the structure and create a coherent narrative. However, that solved by reading other review papers and watching tutorials about the structure of review papers. As a result, I was able to create the following questions and build my paper around it. What do we know about the area of inquiry? What are the relationships between key concepts, factors, variables? What are the current theories? What are the inconsistencies and another shortcoming? What’s needs further testing because the evidence is lacking, inclusive, contradictory, imitated? What designs or methods are faulty? Why study these questions further? Those question pushed me to create new rhetorical sensibilities, stances and made this assignment lighter and easier to tackle.

– Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. During the semester I had plenty of opportunities to interact with this CLO. I’m going to use my Introductory letter as an example because the process of reading, drafting, revising, editing and self-assessment resemble a lot from paper to paper. First of all, in the Introductory letter, my editing process consists of first brainstorming and writing without limit, even if the question asks for a depth response. Personally, I like to write what it is my mind when I am alone. Eventually, I stop and leave the work for a day, and I return and read it the next day. Throughout the process, I erase non-relevant details to the assignment prompts, and change the structure of the sentence to resemble a more professional paper. Then, I organize the responses in paragraphs with connecting sentences. Lastly, I make sure to go back to the main points of the assignment and read the essay out loud in the look of grammatical errors. I implemented the same method for my upcoming compositions. Eventually, something change. For instance, I was not familiarized with the way of writing a Scientist profile and a Literature review paper. Therefore, the writing center, a tutor and more importantly the feedback that I received from my classmates, impacted the final result of my essay. In the past, when I was mentally stuck for an essay, I end up deleting the paper and starting again. But, since the additional extra help found themselves to be a useful tool, I avoided removing everything this time. In fact, being able to hear my classmates feedback help me to self-assess my work more efficiently when it comes to word choice, sentence structure, lack of analysis/evidence and reliability of sources.

 

– Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. As I said earlier, in this course, we have the opportunity to write four different essays that vary from certain technical aspects. The two essays that I feel could potentially fall in this CLO category are the Scientist Profile and Literature Review Paper. For my Scientist Profile, I decided to target primary audiences such as people who would receive the communication directly. These people would be ones who are not entirely familiarized with my scientist and its work. Therefore, I decided to use a fair amount of knowledge about my figure from its work, achievements, medical life, stance in a related topic, and overall why I felt that my figure was worth knowing about. Eventually, I found out that is a responsibility of the writer to not let his readers fall into loopholes, bias or logical fallacies. As a result, I analyzed my author’s evidence. For instance, his so-called achievements, experiments, and stance. This was with the intention to be as neutral as possible. In my literature review, I decided to target secondary audiences. As an example, people who are most likely to receive the paper, heard about it, approve it, or be affected by my message. In the essay, instead of reproducing all the information that I found about nomophobia, I decided to comment and analyze it. Things like the data, patterns, and inconsistencies. The same guided me to do not fall into biases and to pretty much set the stage for a position and a call for action in my research paper.

– Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. Prior to the final draft of each one of our essays, in class, we peer reviewed our work, and wrote reflections on the blackboard site over the workshop in general and after completing our final drafts. To be more specific, during the workshop of my first draft for my Scientist Profile, from the first minute I was able to feel the genuine interest in my work. The experience was rewarding. Through the conversation, I noticed several problems with the way I have done research. For example, which sources are reliable and how to recognize unfounded arguments. Also, I was able to understand what I want to convey to my readers, in what way and to whom my work is directed (primary audiences).

Moreover, it was like a reciprocal relationship because, during the review of other essays, I was able to get a specific idea of what I want to achieve by narrowing my topic. Finally, I did a self-reflection over the idea that: it does not matter if a figure in question is controversial or if its investigation may be subject to contradictions, I can take these potential aspects to write something that describes why this figure is important and worth considering. I never thought this idea and ended up avoiding controversial issues, but the activity opened a new world of possibilities that I must implement for future assignments.

– Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. From my perspective, this CLO was touch in part to the examination of various literature reviews about different topics. This was with the intention of gaining a better understanding of what the teacher should be expecting from us in our literature reviews. Also, with the aim to diversify our options when it comes to a flexible style of writing. But, most importantly to develop our own style. For instance, I find it hard to differentiate myself when it comes to speaking with a person and writing an academic paper. In part, because I learned English throughout the writing of essays and presentations. However, by reading different scientific papers and taking notes on them throughout the semester, I was able to enhance my writing style, the tone of my essay and learn genre analysis and multimodal composing. For example the research paper ” Straight talk about high-fructose corn syrup: what it is and what it ain’t” gave me the understanding that John S White has the intention to present clear facts, and straightforward arguments with the intention to persuade its readers. However, if we look at the data like graphs and the use of words such as the association between, no apparent consequences, correlation etc. The lack of reliability like his title, the fact of being a supplemental publication and where it has been published is hugely informative, persuasive and smells fishy. Overall, this article and many more that we examined gave me the understanding in the different genres, writing style, and multimodal compositions. Nevertheless, getting used to write in different multimodal skills is quite frankly a useful skill but a very hard one to master. I hope that by reading more articles and books I can get use to do it more frequently.   

– Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing. This rhetorical element was a valuable tool that gave direction and body to my essays. For instance, in the research proposal, I tried to provide a summary of the history, finding, terms, data, the point where psychologists are at the moment, what was my intended line of research and my argument in the research paper. I think I recreated and rearrange the valid evidence available regarding the issue of validating nomophobia and its inclusion in the DSM that a priori is an important step when it comes to debating the effect of new technologies in today’s society. In part, this was possible by the use of persuasive language, and reasons as to the importance of including nomophobia in the DSM. By doing that I hope that my readers could understand where we are in this issue, valid arguments and the importance of this disorder to society.

– Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects. During the semester, I approached my essays by researching articles from a variety of themes. The use of the CCNY databases like PubMed, Science Direct and others like Google Scholars were lifesavers. In specific for my literature review paper, I began by searching articles at Science Direct, and PubMed related to psychophysics, the conveyor belt and its impact on climate change and lastly rare psychological diseases. By looking at rare diseases, I encountered a relatively new and awkward one: Nomophobia. The last one caught my attention by the context and the debate over the recognition of this disease by the American Psychological Association. Also, I was curious about knowing the guidelines, the conversation around this topic and if in reality, this was a real disease. The fact of being new and debatable stand out as one of the most significant challenges. The literature about nomophobia is scarce with evident patterns in the actual conversation but with many disagreements and inconsistencies within it. However, at the same time that made the process of picking outsources very narrow and straightforward.

– Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources). I like to think of the Introductory Letter as the preface that eventually led me to the final tweaks on my writing. The fact is that the Introductory Letter helped me out with the grammar, formal structure of my scientist profile and writing relevant information instead of focusing on word count. This action was reinforced after receiving the feedback from Prof. Grove. After the feedback, I made sure to fix the organization of the paper, the effective use of sources and in-text citations and the overall purpose of analytical thinking in any giving information.

For example: However, psychologists are not clear with the term. Some research papers and psychologist argue that is an “addiction,”[1]“a social phobia,”[2]“an object-oriented phobia,”[3]“anxiety disorder,”[4]“or a situation-specific phobia.”[5]This implies that understanding and agreement in the matter is lacking. With this kind of research, it can be anything. The study of nomophobia and its findings of its effects in the human psyche is broad, that can be a remarkable thing indicating that nomophobia may it be a severe disease. Nonetheless, it can also mean that the research is limited, and if nomophobia has such a broad spectrum, trying to orient the analysis with a meta-study towards proving that indeed nomophobia has such repercussions in society could help. Also, Conversely, in another study, males were shown to be more likely to demonstrate nomophobic behaviors than females.[1]Given these inconsistent results, further investigation is needed to determine whether males and females differ in their tendency to nomophobia. Besides, future research should aim to determine which factors predict nomophobia, which can be useful for identifying potential risk groups and developing prevention strategies to help those groups deal with nomophobia.

[1]Mail Online (2008). Nomophobia is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact – And it’s the plague of our 24/7 age. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-550610/Nomophobia-fear-mobile-phone-contact–plague-24-7-age.html, Retrieved November 8, 2018.

[1]Şahin Gökçearslan, Çelebi Uluyol, Sami Şahin. (2018). Smartphone addiction, cyberloafing, stress and social support among university students: A path analysis, Children and Youth Services Review, Volume 91, Page 48.

[2]Stefan Tams, Renaud Legoux, Pierre-Majorique Léger. (2018). Smartphone withdrawal creates stress: A moderated mediation model of nomophobia, social threat, and phone withdrawal context, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 81, Page 3.

[3]Hatice Yildiz Durak. (2018) Investigation of nomophobia and smartphone addiction predictors among adolescents in Turkey: Demographic variables and academic performance, The Social Science Journal, Page 3.

[4]Jessica S. Mendoza, Benjamin C. Pody, Seungyeon Lee, Minsung Kim, Ian M. McDonough. (2018). The effect of cellphones on attention and learning: The influences of time, distraction, and nomophobia, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 86, Page 53.Larry Rosen, Louis M. Carrier, Aimee Miller, Jeffrey Rokkum, Abraham Ruiz. (2016). Sleeping with technology: cognitive, affective, and technology usage predictors of sleep problems among college students, Sleep Health, Volume 2(1), Page 55.

[5]Caglar Yildirim, Ana-Paula Correia. (2015). Exploring the dimensions of nomophobia: Development and validation of a self-reported questionnaire, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 49, Page 131.

Besides, it was a tiring process, but I meticulously make sure to follow each one by going further with the research and analysis. As a result, I feel those points to be active throughout my essay, but still, I am worried about not analyzing enough the information. Additionally, I feel to have addressed the assignment prompt in the aspects of the organization, consistent flow of the narrative, and most importantly I think to have addressed the question “why it matters and why is important for people to know.” I feel this to be the case because I make sure that everything on my paper was tied out to the prompt question. Also, because of the feedback received by friends and a tutor on trying to address the goals of the assignment.

To Finalize, I have enhanced many of the learning outcomes from this class. All of them supported me and guided me to my final destination this semester. But more importantly, the comments received in each one of the assignments, exploration, the help of a tutor, and the friendly atmosphere in class pushed me to feel more comfortable while writing academic papers in different genres. Reading, thinking, writing, stances, genres, drafting, evaluating, and skepticism always stood up to help me get a solid paper.