Aleena Bilal

ENG 21003

Self-Assessment Essay

While taking ENG 21003, I was able to learn a lot in this class, and also improve my writing skills. I’ll be talking about the literature review, scientific controversy assignments, my collaborative research project ( PAC), and some of my discussion posts. 

First, let’s talk about doing my scientific controversy assignment. Some course learning outcomes I was able to learn are developed reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. When first starting this assignment I first had to figure out what scientific controversy topic I wanted to talk about for my paper. I did some research on Google and CCNY library database to see what type of scientific controversy topics were out there. One topic that stood out to me the most was animal testing. I’ve heard various beauty brands state that they don’t test on animals as someone who likes makeup. This piqued my interest in knowing more about why researchers use animals in experiments and what other people think about the topic. I started by looking into what supporters of animal testing believe, and then I found some resources that show what opponents of animal testing believe. 

After reading a few articles I was able to find some that helped me talk about both opposing and non-opposing claims that animal testing is necessary or not necessary and should be banned. The assignment that helped me summarize and come up with an idea of what information I should add to my paper was the summary of the 3 sources assignment. This assignment was done before starting my paper and I was able to have enough time to figure out what sources I wanted to use for my assignment and also get an understanding of what many researchers believe animal testing was to them. When writing the first draft for this assignment I was having a hard time getting all the information I wanted in my paper. But after getting feedback from my classmates during peer review and my professor’s feedback on my paper I was able to fix that issue. When I got my final grade for my assignment it was 7/10. Some feedback from my professor was that I had a lot of plagiarism and that most of my paragraphs were copied and pasted from my sources and my work cited page wasn’t properly formatted. My goal then was to learn how to fix this issue and be able to make my writing better. 

In the next assignment which was the Literature Review, my goal was to be able to do better in revising and editing my work and get collaborative help with this assignment. Because my professor knew writing a literature review was new to the class, she broke down each assignment into small parts which was very helpful when doing this assignment. When the Professor went over what a literature review was I was still confused because I was so used to writing a basic essay or research paper and not a literature review because the concept is so different compared to a regular essay. When finding topics I wanted to find a topic that was really talked about in society and that was the impact of smoking because smoking is a very common thing that many people do throughout the day and as everybody knows smoking is not safe for the body and has a lot of impacts on one’s health. That was the reason why I decided to choose this topic when doing my literature review. The assignment that really helped me get an understanding of my assignment was the synthesizing sources assignment. When reading the sources that I needed to read for my literature review instead of just reading them as a research paper I decided to go in-depth with what each writer had to write about the impact of smoking tobacco and I was able to take the similarities and differences of each issue and put it in my synthesize source worksheet. This was really helpful when writing my literature review. After writing the first draft of my literature review I got feedback from my professor. She told me that I needed to state more than just similarities and differences between the sources I had to think we about the information that I had for example think about tone, organization, references, and more. The revision process really helped me understand the problems that I had in my paper and also allowed me to learn more about how to write a literature review in the right way. The professor’s suggestions for my paper really helped me understand what I needed to do when writing my literature review and learn more about how to synthesize my sources.  I also had to fix my text citation and put information on my interpretation of the sources. After reading my professor’s feedback and fixing my paper I decided to go to the writing center tutor at my college to look at my paper and give me more feedback. Getting feedback from my professor and my writing tutor really helped me do better in writing the literature review and as well as helped me do better in revising my work and writing the final draft better. What I was struggling the most and kept on not doing correctly was my citation page. That is one thing I need to work on for the future when writing assignments. When writing both literature review and scientific controversy I was able to learn more about how to write a draft, time management, 

I was able to learn the course learning outcomes with the help of the Collaborative Research project, demonstrating that I had engaged in the collaborative and social components of writing. When doing my Public Awareness campaign, my group and I were working on a public awareness campaign and came to the conclusion that some good topics to make a campaign about would be cannabis, nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol addiction. We chose alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, and caffeine because many people use these products on a daily basis and are unaware of the effects they can have on your body over time. As a result, we decided as a group that these topics would be appropriate to discuss on our public awareness campaign website. We also agreed that these issues are a very important topic to talk about because they are used a lot in many people’s daily lives. When picking the topics we all chose topics that we thought fit our strengths. I decided to do the fundraiser for our topics because I was interested in learning more about how fundraising works and wanted to see how creative I could be in doing it. When coming up with ideas to make a fundraiser I wasn’t sure where to start because the topics I had was very broad topics and picking a fundraiser for each was difficult. I first needed to find my target audience. My target audience for this fundraiser is doctors, psychologists, people who suffer from nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, and caffeine addiction, philanthropists to help support the funds, and everyday people. The reason why everyday people are one of my target audiences is that if they didn’t know what was going on with people who are addicted to these drugs they are able to learn more and make a good cause if they donated money to the NACC organization. When I realized that each topic was an addiction I decided to do some research on what people who have addictions go through. I saw that what all the addictions had in common was not a lot of people treat their addictions and rehab is very costly for people who can’t afford it to go to. With all this information know I came up with the idea that I should make a fundraiser organization that donated money to make sure people who suffer from addiction to any substance get the help they need. As a group, we are called the organization NACC. The goal of the NACC fundraiser was to help fund money for those who can’t afford the help they need to fight their addictions. After showing my group members my fundraiser they gave me advice on how to fix it and gave their input on ideas to add to the fundraiser and more.

Overall, I was able to learn the class learning outcomes of improved skills for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment for both the literature review and scientific debate projects. improve your source-use habits, such as reviewing, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources Also, my discussion posts, such as the rhetorical analysis of a scientific advertisement, let me learn more about examining sources and images from a different perspective, as well as what it’s like to learn more about the target audience, tone, goal, and so on. One learning component I was unable to complete was the proper citation of sources and rhetorical analysis. I need to put in more effort and learn more about citing sources. Because I was still struggling to synthesize my sources when performing my literature review, I don’t believe I reached the outcome of knowing genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across academic contexts and beyond. I feel like I need more practice synthesizing them, and despite my best attempts, I believe I could have done better.