I believe that over this semester, my writing has slightly improved. I have had a lot of practice and over the course of this semester, have learned to improve several parts of my writing.

The biggest thing I had the chance to do was to work with peers. I have a lot of experience doing long research projects, much of which is done with minimal instructor aid and nearly no peer feedback. Assigning peer feedback partners for the literature review and research paper forced me to present my work. It was particularly illuminating because I was able to quickly find the limits of the audience I expected. The Brilliant Pebbles concept was clear in my head, but when I presented the arguments to peers, I found that I was expecting a lot of prior knowledge such as travel times and atmospheric re-entry physics. These were important things that I assumed the audience would know, but led me to revise and expand my introduction to better convey the challenges and the benefits of the Brilliant Pebbles concept much more clearly. Furthermore, the multiple rounds of peer feedback allowed me to practice this multiple times, and the diverse perspectives of classmates with varying levels of interest and knowledge in physics and economics greatly helped me produce better work that more clearly conveys what I was attempting to claim.

A second way I think I improved is through practice analyzing different forms of media. The most prominent example is the science in the movies assignment, where I wrote a lot about realism and the science behind the movie Lucy. I had been very used to quickly analyzing reports or formal papers, and such an informal form of media was unexpected. The assignment allowed me to use the extensive amount of information I could find and analyze it to better find deeper meaning in such a film, finding lessons and the filmmaker’s philosophy through comparing the accurate and the deliberately inaccurate parts of the film.

This is also shown in the final research paper assignment, particularly when I was going through my inintial sources search. I think I have built a robust methodology for searchng for reliable sources, but this was my first time doing this as a student at City College. The assignment forced me to look at the resources I have at my disposal to find good quality sources, even those that are not formal papers. For example, one of my primary sources was a historical study on the Brillaint Pebbles project, but I verified the credentials of the author and choosing specifiic portions where the reliability is further boosted by other organozations and professionals. I learned a lot that I didnt expect about sourcing through that search process. I typically only utilized formal papers, as I know they are very tryustworty and was able to find a lot of them. This topic is much less popular and a significant portion of the literature is unavailable to the general audience, pushing me to evaluate how to choose sources and quote them well if they dont come from formal academic papers.

Overall, I think I well understood and learned each portion of the Course Learning Outcomes through different media analysis and a lot of practice with peer work. Working with others gave a perspective that I could draw upon, and greatly helped in revising and editing, even altering the goal of the paper, such as the pivot to more background knowledge in the literature review. Being assigned to analyze the movie and less academic papers pushed my ability to find and verify sources through the resources I have, and still form stances well with less than formal sources.