Marcus Carrington

Professor Aisha Sidibe

Eng 21003 Sec A

Cover Letter & Self Assessment

12 December 2018

 

This Is It

Cover Letter

     My name is Marcus Carrington and I am a sophomore at City College. My intended major is Biology and I plan to further my education by attending Physician assistant school to pursue that career. After four months of a long and exhausting fall semester, taking English 21003 better known as writing for the sciences, allowed me to experiment with different styles of writing and to develop the skill of taking science topics and conducting rapid research to make my own claim. With numerous pieces of work completed throughout the course I was able to make a collection of the different essays and include them all here. First and foremost my goals of this portfolio is to exhibit the progress I have made as a writer by incorporating drafts of my work alongside the finals.  The goals of the papers are to inform my audience on assisted suicide while also taking a position on the topic. Moreover, to also provide my audience with research conducted on unethical experiments and the outcomes of each.

     What I believe I have done successful this year was write concise papers and responses that had a direct audience and a clear purpose. In addition, I believe I was able to expand my thought process and think critically. A failure of mine this semester was struggling to get all my thoughts out and on to the page. I failed to free write before completing each assignment causing me to struggle at the last minute to complete each paper. The hopes I have for my work is that I informed many on what assisted suicide is and gave my audience reasons as to why they should support or go against the controversial issue. I also hope that my work provides examples of what a strong thesis should look like and evidence analysis. For the rest of my collegiate career I hope to continue to be a strong writer and to carry over the skills and techniques that I developed within this class. I hope to continue to make arguable they say, I say thesis statements and to have a clear structure in the body paragraphs of  my essays.

 Introduction Letter

   The first body of work that I was asked to complete was the introduction letter. When I first saw the task, I thought to myself that this paper would be one of the easiest that I would have to complete because its about me, however it actually was one of the hardest. When writing about myself I found it hard to have to describe my strengths and weakness and even my personality. I constantly ask who am I as a writer and a persona and what do I want to let others see me as. Moreover, I gained insight on my writing skills that I have such as procrastination. I was able to reflect on my faults and change these habits for the class.

     I am happy that I was able to let the professor know who I am as a writer, presenter, and person right away. I feel like this allows the professor to build a connection with me and see the traits that I have mentioned. If I was asked to write another introduction lettter I would still struggle to come up with ideas to discuss and to create the image of me as perfect and as accurate as it should be.

Response Paper

     The second body of work that I completed was the response paper. Throughout the course I was asked to complete 3 response papers involving science topics. Two of the papers were based on NY Times articles while the third was based on a science podcast. The one I incorporated in my portfolio is the podcast review. I really enjoyed listening to the podcast for the topic was on human connections to robots being very relevant today. The podcast was extremely concise and provided a breakdown of what they were talking about making it very easy to understand and follow.

     While writing the review I found it easy to analysis what the producers were saying. They clearly broke down the purpose of the podcast and what brought it about. I was able to easily relate it to the world and prove that humans build a connection with robots and technology. What I learned from this response was that when someone relies on technology or creates the connection with a robot they find it hard to let go of the object.

Informative Review

     The third piece of work was the informative review. The Informative review was the first paper that required more work and actual research. The task was to pick a controversial science issue and inform the audience on the topic. I found this paper to have some sort of difficulty for I was limited to what I could research and I had to find something that I was actually interested in. Another thing that I found difficult with the informative review was the fact that It wasn’t opinionated and only fact based. As a writer I find it easier to take a side and to defend it instead of just providing evidence and not making a claim.

     Though I found this paper difficult to construct I was able to successfully overcome it. I learned how to take information by doing rapid research and to accurately analyze it informatively. I was able to provide enough information without being repetitive and going off topic. I think I did grow as a writer because I usually arent asked to write papers on this level of caliber however I was successful.

Position Paper

     The position paper was one of the easier papers for me to construct. My strong suite when it comes to writing is making a claim and defending it. Though this paper was based off of the informative review, I was finally able to incorporate my opinion making it my favorite paper to write and the easiest. Right off the back I was able to come up with a strong thesis relating it to the US Amendments. I would say thanks to this class I would of never created a thesis like the one in my position paper before taking the class. I would say I mastered the concept of position papers and proved my understanding of all the writing techniques that go into it.

     For the most part, I believe that I remained the same when it comes to writing position papers. I allowed my evidence and quotes to flow naturally throughout the essay. With the evidence provided and explained the quotes and related it back to the thesis. I also showed my strength of incorporating a counter claim while not making it too over powerful.

Proposal

     The fourth major body of work included within my portfolio is the group proposal. I found this task to also be one of the easiest. The template of the proposal was provided making it easy me to just fill in the information about a topic interesting to me, psychology. In addition the proposal was simple because we worked in a group and each member in my group had a specific section to work on. The most difficult part of the proposal was finding our actual purpose and who our audience was. After completing research and coming up with questions regarding the topic we were finally able to come up with the purpose of informing science students about unethical experiments and how the ones in history could have been change to make it fit society norms.

     What I learned from the proposal was how to write an abstract. I never was tasked with writing one before so it was interesting to write one for the first time. The abstract gave the main overview of the project and I am very comfortable with how it came out. This will absolutely help me in the future when Im told to write science papers throughout my biology career. Moreover, I learned how to create a bibliography. I always am told to create a works cited page never a bibliography so this was my first time doing this as well. I learned How to find reliable sources and to be able to explain them and their purpose to our research.

Research Paper

     The research paper was both a failure and a success for me. I feel as if I didn’t reach my full potential as a writer even though I already knew the information based from the proposal. Being that I was set from the proposal It was hard for me to come up with a different view on the topic. The purpose of me writing the paper was straightforward and hard to branch off and make a critical claim. In addition since, It is a multimedia paper, finding graphs and statistical images were hard. There wasnt many pictures provided throughout the internet for the experiments that i decided to write about.

     What I learned from the research paper was the importance of doing reliable research and how to work the CUNY database. As a writer I now know to look for sources that are peer reviewed and to review the author that wrote the sources. I believe that with the availability of the Cuny database and the thousands of sources on the platform, I can now make my papers stronger and more credible.

Vlog

     Just like the introduction letter I believe the vlog provides the viewer with another side of me.  The intro letter set who I was as a person and what you may see in my work in the beginning while the vlog gives you the last look of what is to come in my life. In the vlog I discuss different things on my bucket list that are easily achievable or a long term wish of mine. I found this medium to be easy for me because everything mentioned is things that cross my mind everyday for I would like to achieve these dreams. It was very enjoyable to make and allowed me to show my creative side. Constructing the video wasn’t difficult due to prior experience with making videos.