My writing pieces produced during the semester demonstrate that I have met the short term learning goals set out for me by the Northeastern University English Department. This essay will provide insight into my writing process and outline specific sections of my writing which demonstrate having met the aforementioned goals. Additionally, this essay will discuss the degree to which I have progressed according my own writing goals, specifically my goal of producing work of scientific interest. Though it need hardly be said, this essay will itself show my completion of the final goal set out by the Writing Program (11), in which students must reflect on and self-assess their own writing.
The writing program goals place heavy emphasis on the students' ability to evaluate sources and cite them effectively in cohesive writing pieces, appearing in at least 4 separate goals (5,6,8,9). The additions to the Wikipedia article on State Space demonstrate my ability to both evaluate and cite sources effectively. Source additions include multiple types of media from an array of publishers. Among them are open access computer science lectures from UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, and a chess diagram from another Wikipedia article. Each source was carefully evaluated for its creative licensing policy, reputation, and accessibility. During this process, aconflict arose when I attempted to use an image of Pacman from the lectures in the article. Unfortunately Wikipedia does not allow the use of copyrighted information on its pages without special permission so I was unable to use it. Through this I learned the difference between the use of copyrighted material for educational versus informational purposes, and thus the importance of evaluating sources and their content.
I have also met my own writing goals by improving my source evaluation skills. The importance of sources and citations is immediately obvious in any scientific research. Any good paper contains citations to a minimum of 5 other papers. If I am to produce high quality research, I must learn to cite and evaluate sources, which was done effectively in the Wikipedia project.
Writing content and style is emphasized in at least 3 of the program's writing goals (1,2,3), and is the weakest component of my writing. My writing often reverts to a formal, stiff, repetitive sentence structure when presented with a challenge. This has a negative effect on my ability to communicate, and also appears tone-deaf to the audience. This is especially clear in the Project 1 essay, whose tone is meant to be casual and whose audience is my peers. Instead it overdresses to a pool party.
The first concept I ever struggled with in CS was that of recursion, or the invocation of a function A inside A itself. It is an intrinsically confusing concept because there are few parallels in the real world. In general, objects in our world cannot contain themselves. The concept finally clicked in a lecture in Olin Shivers’ Fundies I class.
As seen in the above quote, it is far too structured, the tone is insufferably stuffy, and the content too basic to excuse the repetitive sentence structure.
Project 2 demonstrates significant development in my ability to adjust tone for intended audience, and in varying sentence structure. The following quote from my Literature Review demonstrates much better awareness of the intended audience (my scientific peers).
Gradient-based One-Side Sampling (GOSS) arises from observations gained from working with real-world data where, even with optimizations from XGBoost, working with a high number of feature dimensions and decision trees causes GBDT to slow to the point of unusability. One approach comes from the observation that, when constructing decision trees, those with gradients of greater magnitude (the “under-trained” trees) contribute more to the information gain of the final classifier.
The frank, informational tone of this passage is perfectly suited to a scientific audience, thereby demonstrating better awareness of audience as per Writing Program goals, and aligning with my own goals for my writing. It is appropriate for the medium of a literature review, and incorporates more complex sentence structure. As a result the passage reads more smoothly and communicates the intended information with both necessary and sufficient explanation.
At least 3 (4,10,11) writing program goals focus on students' mastery of reflecting on and reviewing their work and others. My review of a classmate's project 2, quoted below, demonstrates my ability to provide revision-based responses to peers.
The review is notably lacking in figures. It presents information that could be either more effectively presented in a figure, or more easily understood with a figure, “Operators are usually evaluated on the time required to complete the task, as well as the number of errors made.” is one such example.
My familiarity with academic writing allowed me to provide concrete feedback about what would improve their literature review. In this case their paper spent tons of time explaining and comparing results which could more easily and clearly accomplished with figures.
I also demonstrate the ability to self-reflect on my own writing and integrate feedback from others. In the peer review for my project 1 the reviewer points out that my 'Difficulty' (Changed to 'Computation' in the final draft) section is confusing due to the inclusion of a number of unexplained concepts.
I also got lost at the end of the paper with mention about Boolean satisfiability and reduction techniques. These concepts were briefly mentioned and not elaborated so I did not understand their purpose. I think that the author could have elaborated more on this section
After reflecting on this review I made heavy revisions and added explanations to that paragraph, which can be seen in the final draft of my project 1.
In addition to completing the writing program goals, I furthered my own writing goals. Due to the importance of publishing papers, success in science rests heavily on one's ability to effectively review and revise one's work. I engaged actively in the review and revision process for each project, which will help me produce higher quality scientific research in the long run.