Ayesha Muhammad
Writing for social sciences
Megan Skelly
Final Self Assessment
Throughout the writing for a social science course, Professor Megan Skelly was like learning something new every Tuesday and Thursday. The class was for an hour and fifteen minutes, not a lot of time for a writing class. Megan Skelly, however, knew how to use those seventy-five minutes to teach and do her best. The course description emphasized the study of society, languages, cultures, and how human behaviors and traditions help us understand our communities. Somethings that I learn whenever we were given the assignment to write was
1: To start with an eye-catching hook,
2: Have a great central idea
3: Use at least four senses to describe the essay topic or any subjects.
I’ve managed to go through this year by efficiently doing my assignment with the help of Megan Skelly tips. I was able to organize my ideas and put them in words with the help of what I’ve learned. Using my writing ability to communicate with my peers while I asked some “interview” questions to do my first-ever assignment in the class was somewhat intriguing but fun and entertaining. It was one of my favorite tasks because I was able to get to know her, stay friends, and still be. I interviewed and concluded how different we are as a person. Her cultural background is diverse than mine—the religion, food goals, everything else that comes along with its questions and answers.
Every week was a different week; coming to the class made me anxious and curious as to what we were going to do. This class has strengthened my ability to write and has helped me when it comes to putting my essays together. After the interview, we did a class observation, and I was able to put myself into a professor’s shoes, and I learned that sometimes we have to try hard to get attention. I was able to point out some things that I have never noticed before. As a student, I can say that lectures that are just based on professor talking can be very unmotivating.
Follow up was something called public place observations, and the place that I chose was the prospect park, and I went with my friends to play Lacrosse and to get some fresh air. This assignment’s purpose was to observe a time/ scene that was interesting and report it in the writing form with details. Usually, around 3 o’clock, the park is empty because of the cold weather. On Tuesday, it was 55 degrees, and there was no wind, and the park was particularly crowded. Regularly, you only see joggers here and there. I was so surprised to see the triple amount of people in the park to get the ray of sunshine. Usually, I do not pay attention to the extreme people around me because of the introvert in me. The baby boy named Austin caught me off guard with his cuteness. At first, I was very uncomfortable with observing a little boy’s actions. The fear of getting crept outlooks by his father was also on top of my head. The one thing that I was worried about was not finding anything to notice or to observe something interesting. One thing that intrigued me was when my father decided to leave Austin with my friends and me for a couple of minutes. His actions showed that he trusts strangers very quickly. There was not one thing that I found disturbing because everything was so pleasant and happy. Those are some of the reflections that I had while doing my assignment.
Furthermore, it was a transcultural interview, and since it was supposed to be done with someone who was a stranger, there were many concerns such as the person might not feel comfortable with answering some of the questions. The questions are related to individual personal options, speech, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and religion. The hardest part about this interview was getting a person to agree on making a conversation with you. There were a lot of doubts in my head, such as, what if the person is not free on the day I am open to doing an interview. However, on the day of the meeting, I was nervous about having HR sit next to me to answer some of the questions I have for her. I was surprised to see how nervous she was to answer my questions; however, she answered all of them with a big smile. I was able to write some answers down even though I was recording her voice as well. When she got a phone call, I thought maybe she would cut it short and have me come back. Thus I was ready to pack up and head home disappointed. When I was typing the interview, I did not know which style to do, so I decided to do a question and answered the form with more details. It wasn’t pleasant going back and forth between the recordings and the notes, but somehow I managed. She was older than me, so I have to address her with respect. However, she said to call her by her name and think of her as her friend, who is just chatting with each other. I liked this assignment in a way because it helped me to get my HR better as a person and how motivated she is by her work.
These are some of the following assignments that were new to me, and I found it very interesting and took a lot of planning and structuring and a lot of time. Being able to interview and ask personal questions was very intriguing and took a lot of courage. I was able to build a solid report with a lot of detail. Professor did her best to tell me where I could improve and which parts were my best while writing the essay. My most significant improvement was that I started to add details in every article, and my choice of the word also advanced.
Peer reviewing played a significant role in making this essay an excellent report and helping me add some ideas along with some details. Then there was the reflection and the overview. There are some areas where I don’t think that I improve to write my essay with some exciting hook and the central theme. The writing was never my cup of tea, but my writing classes throughout the college year made me improve. I was able to use some of the strategies, such as proofreading several times. Revising and editing help me with many of my assignments.
