On the first day of this class, I remember having no idea what it was going to be like, I had never taken an English class geared towards science before, and I didn’t know what to expect. I soon came to realize that a lot of people felt the same way, and our cluelessness kind of brought us together, and it would continue to do so throughout the semester. I started the semester confident in my writing skills, maybe a little too confident, because by the second assignment, everything I had known about writing was completely changed. Adjusting to this new way of writing, without using “fancy” words to make my writing sound better, and writing to an audience that wasn’t just any reader, was a big challenge for me. And so, I started to set new goals for my writing, because I wasn’t doing as well as I usually had before. I struggled to create bias in my writing because I was so used to writing subjectively, and I had never really seen a need for revision, so it was a pretty new practice for me. 

However, even with these struggles, I tried to learn this new way of writing (with the help of my classmates, who often seemed as hopeless as I was) and applying it to my papers. I had an understanding of the rhetorical situation before this class, but it was very limited; through this course, I learned how to really use my writing to target an audience, instead of generalizing everything. One example I can recall is from my literature review, where I state my claim as a factual statement, instead of offering it as a possibility. “These effects correlate directly with traditional treatment methods, but are arguably more beneficial due to their ability to alter a patient’s consciousness, removing the negative connotations they have with their condition.” Something I have constantly struggled with in writing is strengthening my claims, and making it less passive, and I believe this course helped me with that very much. Working with other people also really helped me with my writing. I remember when we first received the assignment for the literature review, I had done the entire thing wrong, and I came to the peer review with just a regular essay. It wasn’t until speaking with others, the student teacher, and you that I realized what I actually had to do. 

This class is also the first class in which I actually had to use the database tools from the library. Honestly, I (and a lot of other people) had made a joke of them, that they weren’t helpful at all, and had no clue how to use them, but for this class, I would’ve been lost without them. The method of researching and relaying data for these papers was unlike anything I had ever done before, but I believe that I developed a good enough understanding to apply it all to my final project efficiently. Although it was the infographic, and there wasn’t much writing, the tactics I learned about targeting the audience and making my writing sound more active were the most useful skills I could have developed. I was able to finally write something without feeling like I had to make it sound “pretty”, because it was simply meant to provide information. With my enhanced skills in scientific writing, I was able to help the people in my group to make our campaign the best it could possibly be. For example, one of our group members reported on a study conducted at a certain university in New Mexico. That immediately caught my eye and I thought: what about this could establish some sort of credibility? People are going to be more inclined to trust our campaign if we have credible research sources. So, I advised them to find that research source and include it. This class has helped me pick up on the most minute details of a paper, and has introduced me to a new way of approaching writing, teaching me an entirely new thought process that comes before you even start the paper. 

I did my rhetorical analysis on a speech, and I thought that I had made a mistake before, but in reality, it wound up helping me for my final presentation. I remember the speaker of the TED Talk I focused on having a way of speaking that strengthened everything she said; she was confident in her claims with data and research to back it up. When I was figuring out what I wanted to present to the class in my infographics and my speaking portion of the presentation, I tried to mirror that mannerism. I tried to be concise, convincing, and clear in everything I said, since our topic was pretty complex, and it would be easy to lose people. It was difficult to synthesize the huge amount of research we had compiled into just a short introduction that explains microdosing, but using all of our notes we were able to discuss it without (hopefully) being too confusing. 

Overall, I learned a lot from this class that I will be able to take with me for the rest of my career. There is no other class that would have taught me how to write in these particular ways, and I’m glad I was able to take it with people who were as eager to learn and easy to work with as the group we had this semester. My understanding of the rhetorical situation, and writing in general, which I thought was as high as it could get, has expanded even further. I still have a lot to learn about writing, and I still sometimes struggle to make my writing sound as confident as I would like. However, I think that I have adapted pretty well to this new genre of writing, and it shows in my progression throughout my papers. I started off absolutely clueless, but with the help of all the resources, including the people I go to class with each day, I was able to work on it and write to the best of my abilities.