Although I was not initially stoked about taking the class, preferring the laboratory and hands-on experiments, Writing for the Sciences has proven to be an interesting and useful journey through which I have honed my scientific and technical writing and communication abilities and achieved several of the learning outcomes. 

Through class activities, I was able to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. Examining the language and structure of example papers enabled me to draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility, providing me with important insights into how I should compose my draft. Participating in peer review sessions, an engagement in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, gave me the opportunity to get a different perspective on my writing and learn how to best edit my writing for clarity and concision. Writing out a short reflection after every completed assignment gave me the chance to properly assess my work, and determine specific areas for improvement in the next. 

The literature review and research paper, the two major writing tasks, played a particularly significant role in the development of my writing abilities this semester. Crafting a research proposal, in which I discussed the focus of my research, was a chance to formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing. Searching for scholarly articles to corroborate my writing gave me practice in using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate appropriate sources. My work in forming connections between those sources and my arguments, in a clear and intelligently written manner, strengthened my source use practices, such as evaluating, integrating, summarizing, analyzing, and citing sources.

I do wish there were more opportunities to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing as part of this class. I am of the belief that one can learn from everything, and think that the exploration of different writing genres and mediums of expression would work to make me a more effective writer. In spite of this, this semester was far from a failure. The writing, analytical, and communication tools that I sharpened through this class will serve me well in my academic, personal and future professional work.