My name is Janeen Wilson. I am a junior at the City College of New York. My current major is Psychology. This semester I took the course: Writing for the Sciences with Professor Swett. The class was packed with amazing lessons and activities to help us expand our understanding of writing for the Sciences. The learning experiences I gained from the activities and lessons will benefit me in my future courses. I was able to express my concerns about childhood nutrition and the effects on our future health.
The rhetorical analysis essay was the first major assignment. This was the first time I can recall that I had to write a rhetorical analysis essay. I was very nervous because I didn’t know if I was capable of completing the assignment properly. As I said in my favorite writing piece, “ I wanted the readers to know that I am educated.”. I didn’t want the Professor to see me fail at the first assignment. I did some extensive research on how to organize a rhetorical analysis essay. I learned about the nine terms, stance, tone, medium, author, purpose, language, genre, audience and rhetorical situation. I try including the rhetorical terms into my everyday dialogues and writing because I want to remember how and when to use terms in context. “ The Rhetorical Situation highlights the negative effects of a poor childhood diet, the positive changes that can prevent such negative health conditions due to poor nutrition and methods that was implemented to bridge the gap of poor childhood nutrition.” This is part of my conclusion where I discussed the problem and I acknowledge that there is a solution to the problem. I was very proud
The next major writing assignment was the Literature Review. In my own words this was my approach to writing a Literature Review. “The mission of our team is to evaluate the effects of socioeconomic status on health. I am concentrating on childhood nutrition and how it relates to future health outcomes.” I began my first assignment with the same topic, but I got to showcase how well I could find scholarly articles using the College’s online library and organized the articles to support my ideas. I actually had to learn these skills because this was my first semester back to school. This is the reason why I am grateful for the experiences I had taking the writing for the Sciences course. This was a foundational course for me to prepare me for the advanced classes that requires a lot of writing and research.
The Public Awareness Campaign was a fun and hands-on experience that I will never forget. I was peered together with some of the best classmates that I could ever imagine to construct a Public Awareness Campaign. Our topics included different ideas, but we focused our campaign on bringing awareness to socio economic statuses and how it affects our health. I was responsible for the multimedia presentation. While exploring my website, under the public awareness category there is a link to our groups website. On that website, click the tik tok icon and that will take you to the Tik Tok page I created. There you will also find the videos that I composed to support our team’s mission. I never knew how to use Tik Tok before this and I honestly don’t think I would have tried to use the app. This class helped me to break out of some comfort zones. I know that I was the oldest in the class and the least tech savvy. However, with the support from my group and the Professor’s guidance I was able to do better than I thought I would. “These days we have more, meaning more devices and access to more information, but yet we seem to be less interested in preserving the beauties of the world.” I wrote these words for something totally different, but I was reminded how much I appreciate having access to a smartphone, laptop and other other means of communication. It really helps to make life less complicated.
The Professor gave us a variety of reading pieces with different styles of writing. We had to read and write a response to the reading. Some of the readings were very interesting and unique. Like the “mental life of a plant and worm”, As I said before I appreciate the topic because it is not a regular day conversation. Articles like that help to widen our imagination and stir up our thought processes. I was very proud of myself about my writing piece, description of a thing. I was even more happy because the Professor recognized the effort I put into organizing my words on describing my object. Please, remember to read it on my website. If ever I am asked to write about a favorite writing piece I did, I would definitely select my description of a thing. My final work showed me that I am great at describing situations for the reader to understand. This class gave me confidence to approach any writing assignment because I understand how to research articles, select appropriate articles, organize my ideas and execute my thoughts in words.
