During my time at City College, the majority of my literature classes have had a creative focus. That’s where my passion was in high school and I have continued to develop that throughout my education. I have a good understanding of how to develop a narrative and characters, while non-fictional writing is usually something I avoid and categorize as “boring”. Despite my occasional lack of passion for it, I appreciate when I can write about something I am interested in without fiction attached. In some classes, I get to write about my favorite artists and analyze their work. In this class, I was able to choose a topic that’s important to me and write about that. During the process, I had a reminder of just how similar fictional and non-fictional writing can be. The majority of the techniques and objectives stay consistent but are just utilized in different ways. 

All writing, fictional or non-fictional, casual or professional, for friends or teachers, goes through some form of editing. No quality writing is written in one session, and then immediately presented to the public. My skills with editing and drafting in my own creative writing definitely helped to support me in this class while exploiting the different learning objectives such as “Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment”. Each of our assignments began with a draft along with a peer review. The draft was the foundation of my ideas and I got feedback from my classmates that helped improve them. It is similar to workshops I was doing in my creative writing classes where we would bring in drafted work and read it aloud to receive feedback before formally turning it in. Without that step of the process, there will always be the possibility that my work is missing something it needs. I’ve learned how important revision is in writing essays with each assignment I have done in Writing for the Sciences. This is because during each peer review, something that I didn’t notice was brought to my attention and it made my work better each time. I also had the opportunity to bring improvements to other people’s work as I revised theirs. 

Something else I have become more aware of is the presence of genre and audience in non-fictional writing. When writing creatively, it is often stressed that you need to know who you are writing for and why. It completely shapes the work you create. The majority of our assignments this semester were “public facing” which means I had to opportunity to work on the writing objective of “negotiating your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation” This is because I had to develop an understanding that even in essays, my writing style will often be one of the most important things. This became obvious to me when writing my Rhetorical Analysis, both in my search for a piece of media and in my essay itself. The theme of that assignment was advertisements, pieces of media fully based on public perception. Every second of every advertisement must take its audience and purpose into account because if not, the risk of being misunderstood, or worse, ignored is present. Advertisement designers are thinking about who’s going to see this, why are they going to continue watching and how are they going to react to this. For a rhetorical analysis, I had to find something I had a strong reaction to, and then go into an in-depth explanation of why I had that reaction which required me to understand audience, genre, and medium.

With each assignment, I have learned to appreciate non-fictional writing more, along with appreciate my foundation of creative writing knowledge. There are similarities that I didn’t know were present and now I am beginning to think of writing as a whole, rather than separating it into fiction vs nonfiction. Even if I enjoy one more than the other, each of them deserves and requires the same level of attention and care to their respective aspects.