Writing and Communication

A goal for students in IAS is to develop their writing and communication abilities by advancing an awareness of the interconnected relationships between purpose, audience, author and context. They learn to communicate their purposes effectively to diverse audiences through writing, presentations, and other media, and to use a range of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, to develop ideas and support claims in ways that best serve their needs. As part of this process, they develop the ability to indicate clearly and self-reflexively the ways their specific acts of communication relate to the work of others. Two assignments during my time here at UWB stand out to me as a example of my skills in writing and communication

The first one is a critique paper of the book, Collapse by Jared Diamond in which I took on the perspective of a committee member deciding on the university's common book. This paper advanced my skills in writing and communication. Through my revision of this essay I improved at communicating my ideas. In the rough draft of this paper I didn't have a strong argument and my ideas were all over the place. After revising and adding to my paper I had a stronger and clear argument. I was able to provide my opinion on the book based on the objectives of IAS and thus all skills of IAS were applied in this paper. One of the goals of writing and communication is to relate work to others and in my argument I rebuttal the claims of another critique and explain and reason why that quality of the book makes it a good common book. I also placed a peer review paper I did for a classmate on this critique paper. In this paper I break down my peer's critique paper. As I worked through the peer review process I show my writing and communication skills. By breaking down my peers paper I was able to provide feedback as to where and how to communicate their ideas in a clearer and stronger way. In this process I used the skills a perspectives gained by analyzing this paper to apply them to my own paper to make improvements in my writing.

The second one is a presentation I did on dam removal in my BIS 243 course. We were tasked with making a presentation on an environmental issue. I chose dam removal as I believed that it was a big issue especially here in the state of Washington that I wanted to know more about. This presentation really helped me in the communication aspect as we were asked to keep our presentation to 5 slides so most of my information was expressed verbally in the presentation with only some data points shared in the slides. This presentation required lots of critical thinking as I developed my skills further in analysis, interpretation, and reflection. This assignment also required lots of research and inquiry. I pursued my question of “should dams be removed?” through multiple sources taking multiple diverse perspectives on the situation. This presentation represents my ability to verbally communicate my ideas to a audience of people.