Julia Galasso 12/05/2019

Writing for Myself

A personal essay, a scientific review paper, and a wikipedia article don’t have much

in common and weren’t exactly the types of writing projects I had been expecting from

Advanced Writing in the Sciences. Now that I have completed all three of those projects,

though, I think their differences are exactly what made them so fitting for this class. All three

papers had different target audiences, which meant that the tone, writing style, and

vocabulary choice had to be different for each. Between having to put my own personal

experiences in writing, delving deep into research articles to collect data, and adapting

information to better suit an audience, I found myself being challenged by each project.

At the start of this semester I hadn’t written any sort of personal essay since my

college application. I knew Project 1 would require me to put a lot of myself into it, and this

intimidated me. So I began by thinking back to past classes, skimming textbooks, and

reading through old syllabi to find common and influential theorists that I could research and

cite in my essay [LG 5]. Collecting facts from databases to support an argument is

something I was very familiar with from past science classes, so I had no trouble including

data on Dewey and Pearson in my essay, and this research actually helped prompt some

more personal reflection. I was surprised to realize that the Scientific Method had been

taught to me since middle school and yet I didn’t know why that specific method was chosen

as the default or how it could be useful outside of a lab class. Looking for examples of the

Scientific Method outside of school is what helped me to formulate the message I was trying

to convey in my essay: “the Scientific Method can be applied to a [wide] variety of situations

… and is not only an integral part of how science is taught in schools, but also an important

aspect in a wide variety of fields, and even in everyday life.” ​[Project 1]​ [LG 3]

Despite having a clear message in mind, I still found organizing my own thoughts and

experiences into a coherent essay to be more difficult than organizing factual data. This
struggle showed in my first draft, which ended up being too vague and impersonal to

effectively convey my message [LG 11]. Being able to effectively convey a message was an

important part of this first project, so I found the peer reviews for this project helpful in

gauging audience understanding. Brandon Stevens wrote the following comment, which

gave me a focused point to work on improving.

The paper introduces a few classes and points in history where the method is relevant, but I
would have liked to see the author go into more depth as to how these certain experiences
changed her life and how. Bringing forth alternate interactions or people would give a more
personal sense of how the scientific method has echoed into everyday life and how it
changed her views.
[Peer Feedback, Project 1]

I was able to take these suggestions and incorporate them into my final draft [LG 4]. One

experience I wrote about was a Biology Project Lab class I took. In my first draft I wrote the

following paragraph:

I took a biology project lab class last fall and the whole class revolved around creating and
executing your own experiment involving microscopic nematode worms. What I, and many of
the other students did, was make hypothesizes about how the nematodes would react when
placed in some type of environment, for example, larva would survive low oxygen levels while
adults would not.
[Project 1, Draft 1]

In this essay, the personal anecdotal evidence was just as important as the factual data on

the theorists, but I had only been interested in the latter when writing my essay. The

resulting first draft was too vague. It lacked the details needed not only to adequately

connect my experience to the Scientific Method and the message of my essay, but also to

make a connection with the readers [LG 8, 11] I was able to see this problem and clarify my

points in my final draft.

Sophomore year I took a lab-based biology class that revolved around creating and executing
an independent research project using microscopic nematode worms. I planned to place
larval and adult worms in oxygen deprivation chambers for extended periods of time to see if
they would be affected differently by the low oxygen levels. Creating a hypothesis for this
project was more complicated than I expected it to be, however, as there was a large amount
of background research to be done. I needed to know everything about the standard behavior
and typical environment of the worms as well as what past research had been done on the
topic. In the end, I hypothesized that the larva would have higher survival rates than the
adults because I found that, when deprived of food, larval worms had the ability to hibernate
until food was present. I hypothesized that larval worms would be able to achieve hibernation
 when deprived of oxygen as well and outlive the adults incapable of hibernating. Because I
had a fairly broad hypothesis, it was important to perform multiple different experiments.
Unlike in high school, I had no way of knowing if the results obtained from an experiment
were ‘correct,’ they could easily have been the product of faulty equipment or human error. I
tested the worms at all stages of their life, in various levels of oxygen deficiency, and for
different lengths of time. I also included several control groups. Because the results from all
the experiments were consistent, I was able to conclude with more confidence that, yes, my
original hypothesis was correct.
[Project 1]

While I didn’t explicitly mention the Scientific Method, I expanded on my original idea and

better illustrated my thought process to the audience. I was then able to use this example to

show how real world applications of the Scientific Method are much less cut and dry than the

Hypothesis-Experiment-Result idea taught in schools. This was a key part of the message I

was trying to convey, but I would have missed if not for the peer reviews. [LG 4] Their

feedback showed me how to express my thoughts and experiences in a productive way that

both I and my audience could easily understand [LG 1, 7].

While Project 1 was an excellent chance for me learn how to better organize and

communicate my thoughts, Project 2 and 3 were exercises in how to communicate my

knowledge to two very different audiences. I chose to write about wildlife medicine for both

my scientific review and my Wikipedia article as it’s a topic I’m invested in. Because Project

2 was a literature review, I was able to dive deep into the topic of raccoon rabies vaccination

programs and include lots of detailed information on their methods, limitations, and

effectiveness. Though the theoretical audience for Project 2 was other researchers the field,

the actual audience were students in class who were mostly unfamiliar with my topic. I did

my best to anticipate the points my audience may find confusing and to use my context

memo to clarify them. I defined a number of fairly common veterinary terms, for example,

zoonotic diseases:

Zoonotic Diseases are any type of disease capable of being spread between humans and
other animal species.
[Context Memo]
Thanks to the context memo, I was able to keep the more technical aspects of my review

paper without confusing my audience [LG 2]. Working through my own writing challenges

gave me a better perspective for when reading my peers’ papers. I kept in mind my own

points of concern, thought of the feedback I’d find most helpful, and tried to be a good test

audience for my classmates.

The introduction covers Fusarium and AMF, which are the two key concepts of the paper. It
introduces them fairly well, but I would have liked to know a bit more about them… The
diseases caused by Fusarium sound very severe, so where are they having the biggest
impact, just the US or is this a worldwide issue? The abstract mentions that Fusarium is a soil
borne pathogen and it might be helpful to the readers to mention what exactly a soil borne
pathogen is and how it operates or spreads, as well as to give a definition of what myotoxins
are and how they work as well.
[Peer Reviews]

In this peer review I specified several points I found confusing and suggested a few ways in

which the author could clarify the points to make them both more understandable and more

interesting to the audience [LG10].

As a literature review, Project 2 involved extensive research. I was easily able to

find a variety of recent research on rabies vaccination programs, and I was confident in their

quality as they were all peer reviewed articles published in scientific journals. However, we

did a ‘reading across’ activity in class that demonstrated how easy it is to end up with

unreliable data, and pointed out a severe flaw in my collected research. Individually my

articles seemed solid, but when compared to each other it became clear that over half were

from the same journal, and authors were various groupings of the same ten people. I still

cited these articles in my review as they had useful information, but I made sure to cite an

equal number of unrelated research articles in order to minimize the potential for bias in my

review. It was important for me to learn that sources need to be examined both individually

and in the context of each other [LG 5, 6, 9].

For Project 3 I edited the Rabies vaccine Wikipedia article. As it was a medical

article, I couldn’t use the sources I had cited in Project 2, because the results found in
research papers and case studies often haven’t been replicated and could potentially be

incorrect, making them poor sources for Wikipedia. Instead, I cited government websites like

the CDC and USDA which publish both general information for the public as well as in depth

review papers [LG 6, 5, 8] Using different sources actually helped me adapt my writing to a

different audience. For my literature review I specifically looked for research articles that

would support my argument that oral rabies vaccination programs are effective methods of

controlling rabies in wildlife populations [LG 3]. When writing the Wikipedia article, however,

I needed to focus more on general facts and the history of oral vaccination programs than

their effectiveness. Before Project 3, I already knew about oral rabies vaccinations from

personal experience, but I didn’t know much about other aspects of rabies vaccines. I had to

do more general research so as not to blow one section of my Wikipedia article out of

proportion. Unlike research articles, government websites are already intended for public

use and contain verifiable research, making their information easy both for me to learn and

to adapt to a less-technical Wikipedia audience [LG 1, 2]

Working on a Wikipedia article was also different from writing a review paper in that I

was not the sole author. While I was working on the Rabies vaccination page there was

already an active editor. I was able to reach out and let them know what I was doing, but

some of my edits did get deleted or altered. In one particular case, I had planned to edit the

introduction. There was information on safety in the introduction that wasn’t found anywhere

else in the article. I let the other editor know I planned on moving the safety information to a

separate subsection, but when I went to make the change the next day I found the editor had

already done it for me. For the most part, having someone else editing the article with me

wasn’t too much trouble, but it did add a different aspect to my writing process in that I had

to take the other editor’s thoughts into consideration, not just the general audience [LG 2, 11]
 I knew from the start of this class that effectively communicating my thoughts and

ideas to my audience was going to be a challenge, and it undoubtedly was. I really

appreciated the freedom we had in topic choice, though, and I had a lot of fun with my

writing. As anyone who has read my papers can tell, I’m very interested in rabies

vaccination programs and I chose to write about (or at least include some mention of) wildlife

medicine in all three of my projects. I was able to use much of the same research between

projects, and this really highlighted the changes I had to make to adapt that information

between audiences. I learned three very different types of writing and I ended up enjoying

myself more than I thought I could in a college English class.