The self assessment essay is a written review of the term’s work, it is similar to a reflection paper but its on the progress put in throughout the semester.
Marvelous Aninye
December 1, 2018
Self-Assessment essay
According to Michigan state university, Writing is defined as a form of communication that allows students to put their feelings and ideas on paper, to organize their knowledge and beliefs into convincing arguments, and to convey meaning through well-constructed text. And, Science writing is a technical writing by a scientist to an audience of scientists. As students, we are encouraged to develop our writing skills to express our ideas in a well composed and comprehensive perspective.
Upon enrolling for this English class, I was skeptical of my performance. Overall, I knew how to pen my words down on paper, but I felt my essays had little to no strength to it. In my previous FIQWS English class, I felt the problem was that I read books I had no interest in and the professor showed little interest in my performance. Although she directed me to the school’s writing center, that still did not help my dilemma. Through this English class and reading experiences, I had the chance to recognize the mistakes from my previous English class and applied it to practical use in my writings. Throughout my learning progress in this class, I have been exposed to various course learning objectives — first, the coursework four science genre essays: Informative, Position, Research proposal, and a Critical research paper. The informative review writing guided my perception of approaches to inform the readers more directly. For this paper, we were tasked with deciphering various science articles on human cloning and then, form an essay to minimize the public concerns by telling the public about the advantages of cloning. To effectively organize my informative piece, I read the articles provided in class viz Savulescu’s “The ethics of cloning” and the Morales’s article and watched the New York times videos provided as a reference “The story of Dolly the cloned sheep” and “Where the debate over designer babies’ began” to outline my points on addressing the issue. In the informative review paper, my arguments were objective; my claims were unbiased on the subject, unlike my position paper, where my arguments were based on a choosing a position, of which I decided hydropower to support as the best source of energy. I learned how to differentiate between primary and secondary audiences when I drafted my Informative review and Position paper. In my informative review paper, the audience to be addressed was the secondary audience with little to no scientific background.
“Cloning is classified into therapeutic and reproductive. Therapeutic cloning involves the use of cloning processes to produce embryonic stem cells for experiments, aimed at creating tissues to replace injured or diseased tissues. Reproductive cloning uses cloning to grow a copy of an animal sharing the same DNA as the progenitor.”
I utilized the adaptive method of narration, and the definition of scientific terms while in my position paper, the primary audiences were addressed, who was science oriented and required no narration or description of scientific terms. Upon examining my informative review paper, I realized my shortcomings such as my paper being improperly punctuated, having weak use of transitions and an unsatisfactory conclusion. I learned from these errors and improved on them in my Position paper. The peer-review sessions and class group work aided me in refining my approach to establish some of the ideas used in my essays. For my essays, I utilized visual images to help humanize controversial scientific practices or issues for easy comprehension. For my informative review paper, I used the visual representation of the first cloned mammal “Dolly” to emphasize the origins of cloning.
Dr. Ian Wilmut And Dolly, National Museum of Scotland
For my position paper, I used the picture of a hydropower plant to demonstrate the significance and versatility of this alternative energy source.
“Laúca Hydropower Plant in Angola”
In my writings, the sources used were science articles published based on each topic addressed. The sources used in my position paper were obtained from the CCNY library databases (Gale group) on renewable energy. The references in my writings were credible because they displayed unbiased reports on the topics and most were relevant to the period of occurrence. In my research proposal, I presented internet sources to support and strengthen my claim on my research topic on the cause of aversion in humans with trypophobia. Finally, the references in my research paper incorporated the method sections from the articles related to my research question.
“Yoshiro Sasaki and other researchers of Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan presented that the ideal cause of these aversions is due to the spatial frequency of the images. The method sections recorded that there were about 15 participants in one of the experiments conducted”.
As a writer I noticed I have improved in the organization of my conclusion, for example in my position paper, my conclusion sums the whole idea of the article and reinforces my argument.
“The use of hydropower with wave power shows a lot of benefits for the economy and the planet, due to it being non-pollutant, being reliable and flexible. The situation is causing the earth to steadily creep into a severe scenario called the “Hothouse earth,” due to Global warming causing fluctuations in the world’s temperature range. That affects the ice caps, causes hurricanes and flooding in the world today. Hydropower combined with tidal or wave power as the leading source of energy production can alleviate this situation. No one knows when the feedback from all the emissions will become too severe, that is why we need to preserve our earth before it is irreparable.”
This class has transformed my outlook on writing because it made me recognize the necessity to proofread my papers and work on perfecting my punctuations. In the future, I will continue to strive to be a better writer than I am now and hope to one day publish a science article on one of my discoveries.
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