Drafts

I found one of the better ways to use write these prompts for me was to use them as a studying tool for my other classes. I would rewrite notes and define concepts or write a paragraph about a topic from one of my other classes. This allowed me to study and practice writing at the same time and I find it really helped me learn the material for the other classes.

Prompts

    The perfect paragraphs had a similar purpose to me as the prompts did. They were another reminder to keep up with the class and served as a good reminder for how important editing and proofreading is. Often I get too lazy to reread things I’ve written so I just leave it as is. Having to read through a previously written paragraph and turn it into something “perfect” reminded me how much improvements can be made from an original draft. Updating a prompt to turn into a perfect paragraph bettered my editing skills because I learned to focus on sentence structure as well as content. The comments also allowed me to look through other classmates writing to get a perspective on well written prompts and also allowed me to better my own work by looking at what other students thought of my writing.

I have learned a significant amount about myself as both a student and as a writer this semester in this class. I struggled a bit with the structure of the class in the fact that we only it had it once a week so I found it was easy to procrastinate the work until last minute because this class had fewer deadlines than my other classes that met 2 or 3 times a week. Towards the end of the semester I did become better at working on this class throughout the week instead of just on Wednesday or Thursday. This was in large part because of the project and working in a group, so leaving assignments until last minute was not optimal since everyone in the group had to contribute and our project was reliant on all of us. Because of this I learned how to better divi my time and organize my time well.

    The weekly prompts helped to keep me on track with this class because they served as a reminder to be thinking about the class and writing prompts for all my other classes. At the beginning of the semester I struggled with organizing my prompts in a way that I would do one a day or spread them out through the week. Sometimes I found I would just post multiple on three days of the week instead of spreading them out. As the semester progressed and I began to develop a more solid schedule, I found it was easier to do the prompts in a timely manner.  

The proposal project was my favorite project of the semester. It was nice to work in a group and the openness of what the experiment could be was fun to play around with. The presentation that we gave to the class was easy to make and pulled a lot of information from what we had written for the final manuscript submission. I liked the collaboration around forming an idea for a project and finding other literature that was similar to our proposed experiment and could serve as a template for our methods construction. This will be an important skill for later in a scientific career when I have to think of and design a project. Next year I may have to do a literature review for an honors thesis and having done this project can help in my writing of a methods section for my project and for the overall aesthetic and layout of my thesis manuscript. It is my hope that I will have done publishable work and at the end of the year I can submit my research for review. Before that though, I have to propose a project and this project has helped show what goes into that process and how I can get ideas from similar projects to shape my own.

These three projects compounded with the weekly draft posts and perfect paragraphs changed the way that I look at writing in a scientific setting. I have had plenty of writing courses prior to this one, but I believe that I was able to gain experience that is relevant to my career aspirations from this course. The methods project taught me the importance of writing clear and concise methods. Whereas the proposal project showed me how to write in such a way to persuade people that my project is worth attempting. Finally, the project at the end of the semester introduced me to independent research and improved my research-poster making skills. Overall, this course demonstrated to me the importance of writing in the sciences and I firmly believe that I came out a better scientific writer.

The proposal project was an interesting project for me because we worked as a group and tackled different parts of the project. Initially, I came up with a rough idea for a research project involving spiders and then acquired a team of two other students from the class. We then streamlined the proposed project and did research on previous studies on a similar topic; keeping in mind that we were writing this to convince people to join our project. I will say that the original draft was pretty rough, but after reviewing the comments on it, I believe that we turned it into a solid proposal. As far as group work went for this course, I would say that this portion went the best for all of us. We all managed to contribute equally to the paper and the presentation. This then lead to a large number of students deciding to work with us for the final project in the course. In retrospect, this project introduced me to a skill that I didn’t previously have and laid a great foundation for my future proposal writing.

One of the assignments throughout the length of the class were draft submissions. For this assignment we had to submit about 6 draft entries every week, which equated to about three hours of writing. When I first heard about this assignment I was not looking forward to it. I was worried that I was not going to have a lot to write about because Writing in Biology is the only writing based class I am taking this semester. Every week as I worked on the drafts I realized that finding things to write about was a lot easier than I thought. The draft entries were not graded for the quality of the writing, so it made it much easier to work on writing. This assignment forced me to write more throughout the week in shorter blocks of time rather than try to squeeze all of my writing right before the due date. I will use this technique in my future writing because I feel like it really benefited me and my writing by limiting procrastination. 

Looking back at start of the semester I didn't know how Writing in Biology would be like, but now that I am done with this class I think it was a good and useful experience for my undergraduate. Each assignment was designed to provide us with the necessary tools for making a final project that summarized what we learned in the class. The Drafts, Perfect Paragraphs, and Methods projects allowed me to reflect on how me and others write, and made me aware of the importance of communicating efficiently in science. The Proposal and the Project offered me the opportunity to work in a team environment were different ideas were exchanged, and it helped me both on my team work and problem-solving skills. This class has made me more aware of the importance of having good communication skills, and it has helped me improve my writing.

Before starting to work on the Project assignment, I was concerned because the species that we had initially thought to use had only two specimens left in my lab. Our plan was to run trials with at least three different spiders, so in the end we had to use a different species of crab spider that was more abundant at my lab. This changed slightly the direction of our project, but in the end was a positive experience because it tested our ability to deal with the unexpected, and scientists usually have to cope with similar problems on a daily basis. As well, there was practically no research about color change for our new species, and our experiment allowed us to make some observations about different color tonalities among spiders of the same species. Regarding the poster, I would have displayed the introduction section horizontally below the title to make a better use of the space, but the overallwork of the group resulted into a final product that I liked. I already had experience making posters, but the Moodle assignment helped me reflect about the qualities that a good poster should have, and proved to be key when designing ours.

The Proposal project was probably the most challenging assignment of this class, because it involved the coordination and agreement of a team. Before I started working on this assignment, I thought of some feasible ideas for a project with spiders, and talked with professor Brewer about them. This made me doubt between working with crab spiders and color choice, or cellar spiders and light placement, because I liked both ideas. In the end I decided to work with the crab spiders because I wanted to extrapolate the experiment to connect it with the ecology of local fields and the interaction between crab spiders, bees, and flowers. My plan was to research on common flowers that are pollinated by local bees to see if there was a preferrence towards a particular species, and then use the color of that flower in the arena trials to test if the spider would choose the color of the flowers that have more chances of being visited by its prey. But my group wanted to make the experiment more simple and eventually convinced me to use the RGB color model as the backgrounds for the arena trials. Nonetheless, looking back on this project I think that we made the right decision because we didn't have enough time for undertaking such a large scale project. I was glad that Alicia and Brad decided to continue with our project when we finished the Proposal and had the chance to switch to other groups.

Before I started the Methods project I had a more or less clear idea of how my figure should look, because I spent the summer working at my lab with spiders and already knew of places around campus with spider webs. Nonetheless, writing about how I produced my figure resulted more challenging than I thought, because I had to trace back in my mind all the details involved in the production of the figure. As I later saw in class during the presentations, having good communication skills is very important for doing science, since facts that one may take for granted can be unknown for another person and thus obtain a different result. Thanks to the Methods project, now I am more aware of my readers when I write, and I try to explain things with enough detail for them to follow through my writing.