Biology-1010 Signature Assignment Reflection

Writing the signature assignment for biology 1010 for me was a very difficult assignment.

I really had to pull from my memories of my technical writing class to finish the assignment. It

was also a little difficult trying to have a more speculative tone in my writing, I’m a creative

writing major. Once you’ve read and written enough short stories you start to use more of an

assertive, active voice. It was horrifying sounding so unsure in my writing.

It took some time to decide what I wanted my signature assignment—I’d call it a

research paper, but I feel like that term belongs to something along the lines of 30 pages and 15

sources—to be about. At the time I was researching different diet and exercise routines for

weight loss and muscle gain. I was feeling a little self conscious with my body weight. I ran into

water fasting, something I had never heard of before but the idea seemed to make sense, and

nobody that had done it had died from starvation or had adverse side effects—so I gave it a try.

I could only go two days before I gave in. It was interesting, though. I stopped not because I was

starving, but because I was bored, I was so use to eating food and drinking coke. I was really

surprised that I wasn’t dying of hunger. I lost four pounds from doing just those two days, and

it’s been weeks now and my weight is still that same number. Any doctor will tell you that the

maximum healthy amount of fat that you should hope to loose is two pounds in one week. And I

lost four in two days.

The process of trying to find information on fasting—the topic of my paper—was tedious

and drawn out. I used the SLCC One Search for quite a while and was only able to find one

decent article on fasting. I was about to give up and change topics at that point, but then I

looked through SLCC’s other databases and found a strictly medical database, and that’s what

gave me the other two sources that I needed. It was when I actually found some decent papers
on fasting that I was happy about the research process. You really have to be specific with your

wording when you use a database.

For me as a writer, research is very important. You can’t just make up whatever you like

in fiction. Although, some people do. To have really good, believable fiction like say the

Martian, you need to do your research. And you have to get familiar with the facts. There’s no

other way around it.