A Reflection on Unit One

                The quick reference guide was a new format for a piece of writing. I had seen some before this assignment, but I never knew it is its own format. Through the process of writing one I used many new programs, learned about my field of interest, and learned about my writing.

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                 Some of the new tools I used are a new citation generator and cluster making programs. The citation generator I used is reffworks. I found it on the University of Arizona library website and I found it to be very useful. Reffworks could create citations for a large amount of styles and only required the user to input certain information depending on the type of source. It then created and formatted the citation or your bibliography page. The cluster program making program that I used in my pre-writing is popplet. Popplet is simple to use and is very useful for pre-writing or organizing my ideas. It allows me to create a graphic organizer of my ideas which makes it easier to see connections between ideas or conflicts between them. After looking at my cluster I actually came up with one of my main ideas in my quick reference guide. These two programs will be very helpful for future writing projects.

                  Before starting the quick reference guide I had not known much about current events going on in my field of study. After my research I have learned a lot about one of the most recent controversies, gene editing. The main reason that gene editing is controversial because of the lack of communication. Most of the communication that occurs is criticism of those doing research on it. Instead of being constructive and trying to come up with a compromise on what is acceptable to be done with gene editing, the majority of communications is criticism and saying “you can’t do that”. The groups against gene editing main argument mostly involves religious beliefs and future fears. If they communicated these in a positive way, they would be able to come to an agreement and resolve the whole controversy.

           After writing my quick reference guide and reflecting on the process, I learned a lot about my writing. A strength that I found in my writing process is my research. I generated solid ideas and gathered a lot of supporting information for my ideas. My research included multiple sources of different types such as social media, online magazines, scientific journals, and other types. At the same time I learned that there is parts of my writing that I need to work on. One thing I need to work on is writing style. In my writing I have a tendency to repeat the same word over and over. Another part of my writing style is my fluidity. I don’t always use transition words so my sentences are choppy. To improve this I need to work on adding transition words and varying my word choice. I can achieve this by reading more to improve my vocabulary and also using a thesaurus throughout the drafting process. The most important thing I learned from the quick reference guide is drafting is very important. Multiple drafts allow you to keep improving your piece of writing, add new ideas, remove weak ideas, and improve the overall quality of your paper.