Antonio Johnson

Writing for the Social Sciences

12/16/23

Prior to the course I feel pretty good with my writing skills yet at the same time there is room for improvement. Thinking back to the course, the name “Writing for Social Sciences”, I would assume it was meant to be writing about things that are happening in society. It wasn’t entirely different from what I had in mind yet the I wasn’t expecting some of assignments we would, in particular the observation assignment where we would find an event and make observations about it, and also the interview assignment where we look for someone to interview about certain topics. This was very different for me since I have never done those types of assignments before. I do find the topics we read about interesting. Some of the topics we had were student mental health, marriage, Ai and the future of work, and food price inflations. The topic I found most interesting was student mental health due to how relatable it is towards college students about how mental health can impact their performance.

Throughout this course I learned about different forms of structure when doing research. When conducting an observation, for structured you have an idea of how it will be conducted and a structured interview is when the person interviewing has questions ready while for an unstructured interview its more of a freestyle, meaning the person interviewing would start off asking questions without a specific plan. The topic I chose to do research on was student mental health and my stance on this topic was that students should gain more access to mental health resources in order to perform well by academic standards. I came up with this idea through research, looking through multiple sources and finding out many different causes of students having server anxiety or depression. The event I attended for my observation also gave ideas on what cause negative emotions that can affect people’s mental health. From my research I came to the conclusion that it is essential for school to give students more access to mental health counseling. For the collaborative and social aspects of this course, me and my group would each do our own parts of the work and then combine it and make edits to make sure the order is right and that it’s well organized. When we first started working together, we made plans on what work to do individually. Someone can work on the observation, the other can work on the interview and another person can work on the survey. Every once in a while, we give each other updates on the status of our work and when ready we put it in one document for us to look over edit and make revisions. When looking for sources I would make sure I use around three to five key words. Once I press search and I see the list of sources, would go through some of them. I would skim some of the sources at first just to make sure they are relevant the for the sources that I have chosen, I would read through them and use them as evidence. When using my evidence, I would either restate what was said in the source or put in a small quote and add on from there. Also, I always make sure I put citation right after putting the evidence which can be either the author, page number, year, or all of them. By the time the paper is finished I put a work cited page which shows where I got my evidence from. When making revisions I look closely at the feedback that I got from my draft. Then I focus more on making improvements based off the feedback I get. For example, for my interview assignment, I got feedback about the structure of my interview, that I must have an intro about my research on the topic I’m interviewing on. Once I got that feedback, I applied it and added what was missing. Also, after applying feedback, I would read over my work, making sure it is good and ready to turn in.

One type of writing that was especially new for me was the interview. It was new to me because I never did this type of work when asking someone questions and putting the exact words they said when answering the questions. Making a survey and coming up with the right questions for it was also new to me. The other types of writing I had such as the observation, the introduction, and the discussion weren’t as new to me since I had experience doing them. I feel that my writing got better since I have learned a few different versions of writing and overall, I feel equipped to handle different types of writing when assigned in the future.