Reflection on Project 1

Project 1 is complete!  Well, almost.  Reflection on an assignment can be just as important as the assignment itself.  Knowing your strengths and weaknesses or successes and failures is only half the battle; understanding them and learning how to improve them is the other half.  Here is my second half of the battle.

WikiImages. "Civil War" 2013 via Pixabay.  CC0 Public Domain License.

The most challenging part of creating the QRG was researching the opinions and voices of the general public.  Although this topic concerns many individuals of society, few people, if any, are adamantly arguing that the research should continue full steam ahead.  This means that the only people speaking out on social media are those that are mad at the researchers, rather than being mad at fellow Americans. 

It was clear that there was a general concern among many, but few people were voicing it.  I had to make a general statement regarding the feelings of the general public, showing an example of mild concern and one of extreme concern, and thus showing the opposite ends of the spectrum.

My most major success was finding claims from multiple viewpoints of the argument.  From the scientists to the public, many people had a different take on the ethical considerations and the solutions to the problems.  This came about by following a websites sources or by looking into another website mentioned in an article.  This helped me find the route of what was said or the exact research and claims.  This broadened my understanding of the topic as well.

I found that asking lots of questions helped guide conveying the importance of the topic as well as keeping the reader engaged with the text.  The questions also prompted me to do my own thinking and led to deeper analysis of the arguments and the debate as a whole.  Although this was a convention of the QRG, writing in subsections and small paragraphs really helped me construct my paper.  My paper had to be clear and easily understood since the topic was foreign to most people.  By writing in small paragraphs, I was forced to keep the ideas short and concise, but meaningful.  The subsections helped me focus on one argument and analysis at a time.

Trying to bring parallels into the QRG often proved counterproductive for the clarity of my argument.  Although a few were effective, many seemed to make the paragraph confusing and overwhelmed with the reader with too much information at once.  This was especially true if the section title stated that you would be focusing on this one idea instead of multiple.

The process of this paper was very similar to other writing assignments, especially in regards to the research.  The research collected was the foundation of your paper and without it, the paper had gaps.  Peer editing is always important, but even more crucial here since you are dependent on your reader understanding your controversy and following along with your paper.

The process was very different in the sense of the last step making sure the paper was visually appealing.  In other assignments, the final step was always to make sure your formatting matched the approved style so that everyone’s paper looked the same.  In the QRG, the final step was to make sure the article was most effective for your readers’ understanding, which would have varied between every student.

With a future of writing science papers ahead of me, it is important that I learn to be crystal clear about my ideas and analysis.  The QRG highlighted those areas in which my wording and structure were sometimes confusing.  Also, writing in concise detail will be just as crucial as doing in-depth analysis.  Even in presentations, it will often be important to get the point across in as few words as possible so as not to lose the interest of your listeners.  This skill can also be applied to life skills such as job interviews.


Reflection:

Getting to look at other students' reflection made me understand some of my own frustrations and challenges a little bit better.  Lia Ossanna's post reminded me how this article was meant solely for the internet and not to be a hard copy.  This 21st century style of writing is indicative of just how much I had to break away from a lot of the "norms" of my previous writings.  Even looking back now I can see that I could have improved my writing if I was more willing to get away from the "rules" I had been taught my entire life.

Allison Perger and I really related in the thoughts we shared after our completion of project 1.  In her post, she discussed how her challenges made her dig deeper into her research.  I experienced the same thing, and it thus reaffirmed that when I run into difficulties in future assignments, I should use them as building blocks to strengthen my piece.