One of the most important jobs of individuals who study and work within science is to articulate their ideas, thoughts, and progress as they investigate and engage with scientific techniques, not only to share the science with others beyond the field of academia but also to move forward in their own work through the writing of grants, proposals, and project outlines. As a pre-medical student, research will be an integral part of my journey down the line, so the key concepts and methods I have learned throughout this course will stick with me and be very useful resources to draw on in the future. 

The New York Times Summary and Evaluation assignment helped me understand the importance of journalism in the sciences. The NY Times author made the primary source article very easy to understand, for trying to read the original article by the scientists themselves was quite difficult and even, at certain points, monotonous. Articles on news outlets written for a more general audience are really important in keeping the public up-to-date with the latest scientific advancements. As this was the first assignment where we were introduced to the process of peer-editing each other’s papers, it helped me kick start the second learning objective, “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” It was interesting to read other students’ work and see the different ways in how they approached the assignment compared to how I did, and peer-editing made the process of editing my first draft into the final more solid and efficient. For example, when writing the first draft, I was a little all over the place with my diction– my peer-editing partners helped me clean up my language so that there were no awkward or unnecessary words, which helped me write more concisely and clearly by myself down the line.

When writing the Scholarly Article Analysis, one of the steps I found challenging was actually finding an appropriate peer-reviewed article that a New York Times article presented in a topic that I found interesting, for most of the ones I easily found turned out to be letters. When I did eventually find one, it turned out to be a research article, but did not follow the conventional IMRAD format like many other articles. However, I think this made my job of analyzing the scholarly article more interesting because I learned how researchers can still present comprehensive and digestible scientific information without needing to adhere to a traditional outline. Both the creative freedom and the obligation to articulate their findings in an organized and understandable manner that researchers have are things to keep in mind as I read more literature and eventually help in the writing process in the future. 

I think my favorite piece of work that I wrote in this class is the General Audience paper because it was really the only one I did not need to make strictly formal or academic in terms of the diction, tone, and content. I had fun not only writing in a less “rigid” structure but also learning the basic science behind the findings of the article I was summarizing. Incorporating figurative language into the paper was a nice addition that I enjoyed writing in my own work and reading on that of others during peer-editing. Moving out of my usual, formal writing style into a more relaxed and natural writing style helped me achieve the third learning objective, “negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.” While I was used to writing in mostly sophisticated language to meet the criteria of most class assignments, I knew that the purpose of this assignment was to appeal to a larger, more general audience with individuals who may not be well-versed in the subject matter, so the assignment really encouraged me to put myself in their shoes and write in a manner that was not too monotonous or filled with scientific jargon. For example, in writing about the gut microbiome, I started my paper by referring to what many know as the “gut feeling” because it is a largely relatable concept that most are familiar with and can be used to define what exactly the gut-brain axis is: “the gut microbiome…powerfully influences our brain and nervous system through neural networks that often induce what many would call a ‘gut feeling.’.”  

After reading published articles and learning the general structure of how they are written from previous assignments, the Lab Report assignment gave us the chance to walk through a simplified process of conducting our own study and writing our own paper in groups. One of the first topics of discussion that arose when my group convened for the first time was whether each of us lived on campus or had to commute. Following this direction, we decided to center our project around a student’s residential status and its effect on GPA. As we started designing our survey questions, we came across challenges with the wording of the questions and how to control for as many confounding variables as possible, but we also realized that making the survey too long would discourage students from participating or completing it. The cooperation from this assignment helped me achieve the fourth learning objective, “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes” because working with my group during class time really helped us overcome those obstacles and also helped me complete my own section for the report. I believe this project helped me develop my communication and teamwork skills because there were a lot of times outside of class when we met and talked over any issues or how to make progress on our report. The writing process itself was surprisingly collaborative as well– all of us contributed to editing each other’s sections to make the paper flow more seamlessly, and writing in a group strengthened our individual writing skills, especially because of how we were able to bounce ideas off each other. 

I really enjoyed writing the Annotated Bibliography because it allowed me to focus on and read primary sources about a specific line in research that interested me. My topic of the connection between sudden infant death syndrome and cardiac issues is not a very commonly studied topic, so this assignment was when I had the most opportunity to work on my progress with the sixth learning objective, “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.” Most of the sources I found at first about this topic were reviews, but I was able to find recently published primary sources by searching through the reference lists of these reviews and also by using filtering and advanced searching options when I was looking for articles online. I remember when I was first looking for ideas for a topic, I expanded my search efforts from just Pubmed and JSTOR to the sites and databases of known journals as well, such as Nature and the Public Library of Science. 

Writing the Literature Review was a challenging but exciting process. This was the first time in this class where we were expected to evaluate and build conclusions off of the work of multiple teams of researchers while formatting our thoughts in similarly formal, scientific jargon. This assignment helped me most with the seventh learning objective “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).” Because the literature review required us to incorporate the claims and findings of multiple sources throughout our own writing and synthesize the articles, the way I approached this assignment was by making a list of key points for each article and making sure to highlight the ones that were both consistent and inconsistent across all three. For example, I noticed that all three articles emphasized the finding of variants within the SCN5A gene for they were most commonly “associated with inherited disorders of the heart such as LQTS, SQTS, Brugada syndrome, and CPVT…(Tester et al. 2018; Liebrechts-Akkerman et al. 2020; Köffer et al. 2020).” I was able to identify the clinical implications when taking into account the results of all three articles instead of just summarizing the ones proposed for each article individually, and in general, this assignment helped me a lot in the practice of reading and evaluating primary sources. 

While I am very pleased with my growth throughout this class, one of the areas which I still need to work on is maintaining a neutral tone during scientific writing. I sometimes lean toward as direction in my writing where I end up providing commentary on what I read, but in works such as the Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review, it is important to leave out any personal comments and make sure that I was using strong evidence to solidify my claims as much as possible. 

I have grown a lot both personally and academically because of this class, but the moments of development I have previously highlighted are not due to my effort alone– I am thankful and grateful for a really helpful instructor who cares about their students a lot (thank you Professor Brown!) as well as wonderful peers who are willing to provide both in-depth feedback and words of support.