Jacob Fies
Jacob Fies
Sophomore Marine Biology Major, Roger Williams University
Reflective Portfolio Introduction
Throughout the course of Professional Writing for the Sciences 310, the focus of the semester has been “how to communicate in the sciences.” This has taken a few different forms, including how to communicate science for other scientists, and how to communicate the sciences for a more general “public” audience. In the class these two were referred to as, scientific writing and science writing respectively. We began looking into these topics through the scope of Montgomery’s “The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science”. Within this first Minor Assignment I explored how rhetoric is used within both scientific writing and science writing. From Montgomery’s writing I learned the importance of incorporating rhetoric into any science-based writing, due to the need of convincing others of the validity of your work. By incorporating techniques like this, you can effectively communicate with people of all backgrounds, those both in and out of the sciences. This was a technique I attempted to incorporate into my first Major Assignment as well, with the hope that it would help better communicate what I had to say to all audiences.
The next major topics we looked at in the class were those surrounding the overarching topics of genre and discourse. This included topics such as; genre sets, genre systems, genre typification, and discourse communities. The one I focused most on out of this set was genre typification, as we read about in Bazerman’s “Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems”. Genre typification became important as I was researching for my first Major Assignment. Understanding that genres have a typified way of writing for them, as I also learned through my first interview with Dr. Colin, allowed me to search for inconsistencies and differences within the two grant proposals to find which rhetorical techniques made them successful.
The final major area of study we focused on in Writing 310 was understanding how to write for specific audiences. This is different than the focus on rhetoric as mentioned before because instead of focusing on convincing, this look at audience was to understand how to convey information in a thoughtful and interesting way to a variety of audiences. With this knowledge, we each undertook different final projects in which we worked for community partners to generate deliverables that they could use as media for their given organization. My groups project worked to generate descriptions of local nature preserves for the Rhode Island Nature Conservancy could use on their new website. Doing this work helped me better understand what it takes to focus in and formulate information that would be well received by people of all different audiences. Additionally, this project gave me better insight into what it means to submit a proposal and must generate exactly what you promised as a final project.
Reflecting back on the course holistically, while we may not have “learned how to write” I believe the things we did learn have proved even more valuable. Approaching a writing class with a focus on how to write for specific audiences over refining things like grammar or syntax, which we have been learning for years, gave a much clearer focus to the entire semester. It was something not many of us had ever really considered before, and I believe personally has elevated my level of writing significantly.
Additionally, to note a couple of the recommendations I received in the writing center on my website as a whole. First, it was suggested to me that I add some hyperlinks that connect any terms I use directly to my glossary for easier access. Additionally, it was suggested to me that I supply a link directly to the formatted deliverables for our final project instead of trying to pull everything directly onto the website and losing a lot of the formatting we had done. All other recommendations were regarding specific spelling or grammar errors which were subsequently fixed.
The next major topics we looked at in the class were those surrounding the overarching topics of genre and discourse. This included topics such as; genre sets, genre systems, genre typification, and discourse communities. The one I focused most on out of this set was genre typification, as we read about in Bazerman’s “Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems”. Genre typification became important as I was researching for my first Major Assignment. Understanding that genres have a typified way of writing for them, as I also learned through my first interview with Dr. Colin, allowed me to search for inconsistencies and differences within the two grant proposals to find which rhetorical techniques made them successful.
The final major area of study we focused on in Writing 310 was understanding how to write for specific audiences. This is different than the focus on rhetoric as mentioned before because instead of focusing on convincing, this look at audience was to understand how to convey information in a thoughtful and interesting way to a variety of audiences. With this knowledge, we each undertook different final projects in which we worked for community partners to generate deliverables that they could use as media for their given organization. My groups project worked to generate descriptions of local nature preserves for the Rhode Island Nature Conservancy could use on their new website. Doing this work helped me better understand what it takes to focus in and formulate information that would be well received by people of all different audiences. Additionally, this project gave me better insight into what it means to submit a proposal and must generate exactly what you promised as a final project.
Reflecting back on the course holistically, while we may not have “learned how to write” I believe the things we did learn have proved even more valuable. Approaching a writing class with a focus on how to write for specific audiences over refining things like grammar or syntax, which we have been learning for years, gave a much clearer focus to the entire semester. It was something not many of us had ever really considered before, and I believe personally has elevated my level of writing significantly.
Additionally, to note a couple of the recommendations I received in the writing center on my website as a whole. First, it was suggested to me that I add some hyperlinks that connect any terms I use directly to my glossary for easier access. Additionally, it was suggested to me that I supply a link directly to the formatted deliverables for our final project instead of trying to pull everything directly onto the website and losing a lot of the formatting we had done. All other recommendations were regarding specific spelling or grammar errors which were subsequently fixed.
Photo used under Creative Commons from wuestenigel