Fatoumata Diallo 

Writing for the Sciences 

Professor Zayas 

Reflective Self-Assessment 

May 18, 2025 

 During this semester I not only improved in my writing, but I also improved in communicating with others. I was able to communicate with my group members during the jargon and science movie project even though we all had different ways of communication we were all still able to complete the project in time, even with people having other commitments or even out of state. Through this course, I learned to be more empathetic and aware.  

 I have gotten better with drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. With drafting I have learned to create outlines which I typically don’t use but were required for both my literature review and research paper. I feel like I got better at revising and editing because I need to revise and edit my research paper and literature paper. For self-assessment, I would look over my work and see how I have improved and where I lack. I will bring these skills with me to my next courses.  

At first, I struggled with creating my own goals, but then I learned to make goals specifically on when I should complete an assignment I would try my best to complete an assignment at least a day earlier at first I was accomplishing this goal but then as the semester went on, I lost to procrastination. However, I was still able to complete my assignments on time. When it came to audience expectations, I had to think about who my audience was and how to convey it. My message was corrected to them, especially in the jargon translation project. We had to choose our audience and explain a jargon-filled text to them.  

Collaboration played a part in my growth. I had group projects that required me to collaborate with my classmates. For the science movie project, my group watched a movie and worked together to see if science fiction is plausible. We also had many peer review days where we would look at each other’s work and help each other improve our writing. The Feedback I received from peers helped me, especially with my literature review I was able to tweak it and get a passing grade on it. I have also learned to ask questions and give feedback to others.   

Engaging in genre analysis and multimodal composing has helped me gain confidence. All the presentations we did have helped me express my ideas to an audience more effectively. With the research paper, we had to create a presentation that accurately explained our topic and the information surrounding it. It has helped me with public speaking and speaking in a professional environment.   

The research Paper has helped create a stance in my writing because we had to research and argue about a topic. I chose to speak about inflammatory breast cancer and the best treatments for it. I had to research inflammatory breast cancer treatment and determine which of the treatments were the most effective. I learned to express a clear point of view and argue for it.  

This course has helped me use the online databases the college has provided to choose sources for my writing. This course had a library sitting where we discussed how to access the databases and how to accurately search for your writing. This has helped especially with my annotated bibliography and research paper where we were required to search for sources regarding our topic that were credible and relevant.   

I often struggled with strengthening my source practices but with the more writing assignments that we had, I have improved. When writing my literature review, I used long quotes that could have been paraphrased, and I also had issues with citing sources. I implemented all that feedback into my research paper and was able to revise my literature review.