Self-Assessment
Throughout writing for science course, I am now able to distinguish difference between Informative paper, position paper, research paper. For informative paper, the main purpose is to provide as much information as you can for your audience. Since informative paper is only providing information, the writer should not take a side in the paper. For position paper, the writer is required to take a side after providing enough information for the audience. The paper is certainly allowed to be biased, but all the opinions that appears in the paper must be based on scientific fact, and all the citations must be retrieved from reliable sites. For research paper, it’s not required to take a side, but expected outcomes and hypothesis would be required, and the outcome and hypothesis must be examined with latest scientific facts. Before research paper, the writer needs to write a proposal. A proposal is basically a shorter version of the research paper. All the important information about the paper should be summarized in the proposal because the purpose of a proposal is to help the approver understand what the paper is about, and what the outcome and result are.
There’s one important lesson I learned from this class is that it takes time to write a good paper. I started writing my position paper very close to the deadline because I thought I had all the information I needed, and it’s also an informative paper, it shouldn’t take long to finish it. After that, I learned that the idea of a paper is all about information is clearly wrong. There are few things I will always remember since that. First, always start your paper with the conclusion. Since the introduction is certainly about the thesis, the conclusion will decide where the paper is going. Second, it’s important to organize all the information before starting your paper because the written ideas are only clear if the writer is clear about all the information and ideas that are put into the paper. Third, always brainstorm about the topic, even if it’s an informative paper. Brainstorming helps the writer to become more interested in the topic, which helps the writer to be more active when doing research. For example, the topic of my informative paper is about clone. While I was looking into it, I became curious about why the clone is a baby, but not a grown-up. It’s actually a very basic idea in biology, but I wouldn’t know why If I weren’t interested. Fourth, make sure that the paper you are about to read is what you need. It’s important to read the abstract before looking into the whole paper. If there’s no abstract, you can always take a scan, instead reading line by line. I did not realize how important knowing how to scan is before this class. There are too many related papers that I read carefully, but later it just became a waste of time.
The audience of your paper plays a big role of your work. If the primary audience of your paper is the general public, every little detail should be crystal clear even if most of them know what that is. If the primary audience of your paper is in the same field, basic ideas can certainly be skipped in the explanation part. Also, how much you will need to explain about an idea that appears in your paper always depends on the level of your paper. For example, a mathematical paper is only for mathematicians. Laymen certainly have access to the paper, but since it’s mostly for mathematicians, there are some of the explanation of proofs and basic ideas can certainly be skipped. Another obvious example would be the difference between informative paper and position paper. For informative paper, the primary audience is the general audience, every basic idea should be explained. For position paper that we write in this class, our primary audience is people who often buy science magazine, so we assumed our primary audience have basic knowledge in this filed.
There are three major papers that are assigned in this class: informative paper, position paper, and research paper. For informative paper, I didn’t give credit to the author of one of my quotes. For position paper, what I gained from peer-review was that it’s wrong to have none opposite opinion, even if it’s a position paper. For my research paper, my professor takes my points off because Wikipedia is not a credible source, it can never be used in a research paper.
The purpose of using print and digital technologies is that to help the audience have a basic idea of what this paper is about. It’s important because the audience might have never seen this topic before, the image can help them links your paper to something they are familiar with, which is why the visual image should always be about your paper, and always assume your primary audience is the general public when choosing an image. For example, my informative paper is about clone. The image I chose was bunch of micro no-face men standing under the microscope. I chose that image because it shows how clone is part of science, and how science is able to create clone.
I found most of my science sources on google scholar. Although most of the papers I found on google scholar are credible sources, there are some papers that are not quite professional. When I was writing my research paper, I wanted to find an old paper, and compare with today’s paper, and the gap between the two papers would be one of the essential parts of my paper. The problem is that, even though the paper “Deal With Lateness” I found and used was from “.edu”, it’s still not quite a credible source, because there are even few typos in the abstract. It’s not suggesting that everything in the paper is terrible, but it’s enough to see that the writer is not being serious enough. Therefore, it’s important to read the paper carefully before considering it a source, even if it’s from a credible site.
In my informative paper, in the conclusion I stated that “To put it differently, the real prior thing is not how we solve all the issues before creating clone human, but to think about what the factors of important issues are, and how to pick them out from all the issues are being raised.” The professor commented that the general public is always legit, and I think it makes more sense than my logic because concerns shouldn’t only be made by the scientists because after all, we all are the victims and beneficiary of the science. In my position paper, I firstly introduce the pros of solar energy, and then I started counter argument with “It’s debatable that some cons of solar energy should really be considered cons.” I argued that “cons” are not real cons if there are more important issues that need to be fixed. For example, solar panel will take up a lot of space, but it’s hardly considered a con if we were urgent to find a alternative energy source. In my research paper, an opinion from one of the primary sources is that people are chronically late because the events the chronically late people going to are not important enough. I argued that chronically late people are making the events less important to them because it’s easier to deal with. “Some chronically late people might feel ashamed or embarrassed for being late, some are not, but they are still going to be late next time.”
It’s hard to decipher difficult source because if you weren’t in the field, you would have to start getting to study for all the basic ideas. Before the position paper, we discussed the idea of fracking. I was told that our paper will be about alternative energy, but I didn’t know how fracking is related to alternative energy because I didn’t even know the world is desperate to seek for alternative energy. After reading some paper about fracking, I started to see what’s fracking, but I did not understand how fracking works. So, I looked up online to see how fracking works visually, and then go back to the article that is given by our professor. It became clearer that why politicians were taking sides about fracking. There are some politicians believe that the development of a country cannot be stopped because of global warming, because other countries will catch up in no time. There are also some politicians believe that there’s nothing that is more urgent than solving sentimental problem, therefore the fracking must be stopped, even if it might slow down the development. To sum up, a way to understand the paper better is to understand the very basic ideas about the paper. It’s not necessary to understand the idea just through the paper you are reading, there are so many tools we can use out there.
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