Dear Professor Carr,

Throughout the course, “Writing for the Sciences”, my writing has gone through a series of reshaping projects to mold it into what it is currently, including this website project. I present to you my Digital Portfolio project, encasing the major projects, trials, and tribulations that I have went through over these past few months. 

My perceptions on writing has definitely changed this semester, especially for science.  For one, I explored the different genres for scientific writing. I would’ve never guessed the impact of genre on how an audience would grasp certain information. The language I use can also limit my audience, taking into consideration that not everyone is an English speaker. I thought this course was just going to teach how to analyze data more efficiently or something along those lines, but instead, I learned how to communicate science to professionals and unprofessionals. 

Audience and purpose impact the content of what is being written. As previously mentioned, the language you use may or may not limit your audience. For example, if you want to raise awareness about air pollution in a low-income urban neighborhood, it is best not to use highly-scientific jargon because the people of that area may not understand it. Your purpose of text can lead you to persuade, entertain, and/or inform. If your purpose is to solely inform, then there should not be any stance in your text because that’ll make it become persuasive. 

For me, there was no challenge writing across various genres and addressing specific audiences. Once you learn the conventions for each genre, determining which one to use to address a specific audience becomes easier. For example, if I want to inform children how to wash their hands and why it is important, I would use a scientific narrative because children love stories and always remember lessons from them. If I took a more logical approach, like an informative review, the children would bore out easily.

As a class, we explored and analyzed, through reading and writing, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations by having weekly readings from the different genres, identifying genre conventions of the texts, and indicating elements from the text which tell us the rhetorical elements of it. For instance, if a text tells a story with a scientific theme behind it, I would know that the genre is scientific narrative because the genre conventions of a scientific narrative is that the text follows a storyline and contextualizes abstract truths. 

In my introduction letter to you, I stated, “…two characteristics of an articulate speaker, in my opinion, are cadence and confidence.” I disagree with this now. An articulate speaker is someone who is efficiently communicative and understandable. My thoughts have changed because my definition of the word “articulate” has changed. It means to communicate comprehensively and I initially thought it was about how you deliver information. I also stated to you that “Standard American English makes science writing more accessible to the general public because it doesn’t have grammatical gender, tenses generally only alter the suffixes of a verb, and it’s the most spoken language of the world. However, there should always be an option to see the writing in at least one other language, such as Spanish or Mandarin.” I still agree with this statement because while writing for this class, it was more efficient to use English, due to my location. However, simplified English is necessary for connecting to a broader audience because not everyone is an English speaker. For certain genres we’ve written over the semester, I included other languages such as the flyer from the multimodal project and this is because my audience was very diverse. 

All in all, I enjoyed my time here in this class. I definitely picked up tons of new information and lessons throughout this semester, which I am grateful for. I can see myself applying everything I’ve learned into real life and especially my career. Thank you for a substantial, yet fulfilling, semester. 

Sincerely,

Kasia J. Windett

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