Tamerlan Tserenov

ENG21003

Professor Zayas

Reflective Self-Assessment

05.17.2025

Self-Assessment Essay

At the beginning of the Writing for the Sciences course, I had difficulty with scientific writing and the proper use and balancing of objectivity, clarity, and evidence. My goal for this course was to develop and improve the necessary aspects of writing scientific works. Over the course of the semester, I developed important skills that helped me achieve my goal. In this self-assessment essay, I will talk about the course learning outcomes that I received at the end of the course.

The first of them is the knowledge of mine and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and drawing on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. During this semester, I became convinced that people express their thoughts and even analytical abilities in completely different ways, depending on the cultural and linguistic background that everyone acquires and changes over the years. If I used to think that there was only one way to write a strong scientific text, then during the semester, working with fellow students and reading their work, I realized that writing strong work can vary in ways and tends to be unique. This helped me develop a rhetorical sensitivity — the ability to choose the style and tone of writing depending on the topic and audience. For example, while working on the Jargon Translation Project, which was a group effort, I and other members of my group presented the work and functions of FAK with a focus on the audience of parents of high school students. This project helped me develop the skill of correctly presenting material to a specific target audience.

The second of the learning outcomes of the course is the improvement of strategies for reading, drafting, revision, editing, and self-assessment.  I used to write texts at the last moment and almost never returned to them. In the ENG21003 course, I realized the importance of step-by-step work: first, source analysis, then a draft, and the final actions are editing and self-assessment. During this semester, I have significantly improved my reading and draft skills. This was especially evident in the work on the Research Paper, which was divided into several steps: the research proposal, the annotated bibliography, the literature review and the research paper, where two of the latter had a rough and final draft. Despite this, the final versions of my works did not differ much from their rough draft, as I tried to show maximum perseverance on the structure of my texts and then work on the recommended small changes in them. I carefully reread my texts from the reader’s point of view, which helped me notice ambiguities and improve coherence. This process, as well as the assignment itself, taught me to take a serious approach to writing such works and try to achieve their maximum potential.

During the course, I realized that successful writing is not just about stating facts, but the ability to adapt to the expectations of a specific audience and genre. This is also related to the third of the course learning outcomes – negotiating your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. When working on different assignments, I had to change the style and structure depending on the purpose of the text. I’ve learned to ask myself important questions: who am I writing for? What does my reader already know? Frankly speaking, I still have difficulties with this part of expected learned outcomes since it is more usual for me to write creative works in the same style and I should continue to develop this skill.

Course learning outcome under number 4 is to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. I used to think that writing was an entirely individual process, and a subjective opinion would probably confuse and redirect the original idea. However, in ENG21003, I realized how important teamwork is in written texts. The peer review sessions were especially useful for me, when we exchanged drafts and gave each other feedback. Thanks to the comments of my classmates, I noticed flaws and grammatical errors, which I subsequently corrected. At the same time, analyzing other people’s work helped me better understand the structure of the text and learn to see the strengths and weaknesses of writing from the outside. Despite the usefulness of this process, I would like to say that focusing on teamwork verbally could help me a little more than written comments.

One of the most interesting aspects of the course for me was point 5 – the study of various genres of scientific writing and the creation of multimodal projects. For example, when creating a presentation on the topic “Nostalgia and its properties”, which was also the object of my research paper, I did not just rewrite fragments from the research paper, but reworked them so that they were visually convenient and understandable: I added titles, highlighted keywords and pictures. This required not only knowledge of the topic, but also an understanding of how visual attention and text perception work. The analysis of scientific articles also helped me to better understand the structure of professional writing. Each element has its own function. Thanks to this, I have learned to flexibly switch between genres and use different formats for effective communication.

Expressing my own stance in a scientific text turned out to be one of the most difficult tasks for me. I have often doubted where the neutral presentation of facts ends and the author’s point of view begins. For example, in my research work, I found that I disagree with the mentioned factors of the positive influence of nostalgia on mental and emotional well-being .I needed not only to gather information, but also to justify the importance and scientific background of the topic, which was also difficult to justify. Nevertheless, with practice, I began to better distinguish how to argue ideas based on sources. Although I’m still working on being more confident and consistent in articulating my position.

Course learning outcome 7 – practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects. In my previous English course, I first became familiar with the resources provided by the education system like OneSearch and academic databases. At the beginning of this course, I still did not have a sufficient understanding of how to properly use these resources to write scientific papers. It took a long time to find suitable sources, and not all of them corresponded to the topic. However, as I worked, I started to get better at navigating the system and learned how to use filters and search criteria. For example, in The Literature Review on the topic of nostalgia for the research paper, I used an article by Lammers et al., (2025), which examined how nostalgia can enhance sympathy for harmful aspects of the past. I not only quoted their conclusions, but also analyzed how they relate to my topic. This was one of the articles I found on OneSearch. This experience has shown me that sourcing is not just a technical step, but an important part of critical thinking and argumentation.

The last course learning outcome is to strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources). In this course, I began to understand more deeply that working with sources is not just inserting quotations into a text, but a whole process of analyzing, comprehending and integrating information. This semester, I started paying more attention to how sources support my argument and how different points of view can be compared. I started practicing not only quoting, but also paraphrasing, summarizing, and most importantly, analyzing. I realized that it’s not the quote itself that matters, but how it relates to my ideas and how deeply I understand it.

After completing The Writing for The Sciences course, I acquired and honed my skills for writing scientific papers and improved my critical thinking. I learned to take a more attentive approach to editing, choose words depending on the audience, and critically evaluate information. This essay helped me realize not only what I have already achieved, but also where I should move on as an academic author. The skills acquired during the course were an important step for me towards more mature and grounded scientific writing.