Thlog Five

On this fifth week in Writing 2, I especially learnt my weaknesses in writing from Zack’s comments on my Writing Project #1. My difficulties included the structure of organization, and directness of my main argument. To overcome these, I may look into restructuring my paper into three main ideas instead of analyzing three sources, as well as maintain precision of my main points in my argument. I believe this advice will help me for the next two writing projects. Student ID 14 also had noted they had troubles with structuring, and that they also think reverse outlining would be beneficial for their paper, which I believe I need to do too. Nevertheless, I am still very happy with my mark for WP1, and aim to improve further. I also learnt about italics and its use for emphasizing language, titles, and foreign language. We then moved on and realized ‘happiness’ has many different conceptual definitions. One student said, “A certain “thing” that happens AFTER an event (implies a stimulus/response, cause/effect… experimental conditions)” whereas I defined it as a positive sense of emotional self, physical self, mental self, and social self. We are able to recognize two completely different definitions for one concept. We then continued to memorize the structure of most empirical “scholarly” research articles through the letters IMRAD– Introduction, Method, Results, Analysis, and Discussion. These papers are structured this way especially for readers so the orderly process of the conducted research is clearly understood. The reading due on Wednesday, ‘How to write like a reader’ was an extremely interesting read. Overall, Mike Bunn explains the importance of understanding that writing consists of series of choices, which helps us recognize the decisions of words and techniques we might want to use in our own writing. This was definitely the most interesting read out of all readings. Unfortunately I was unable to attend Wednesdays lesson due to the Big West Conference for tennis.

PB2A

For my PB2A, I chose the scholarly academic publication, ‘Adolescents’ perceptions about their weight and practices to lose weight,’ written by Filiz Hisar and Ebru Toruner, which studies the perceptions of adolescents about their body weight and practices to lose weight. This health-related research article from the Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing is easily recognized and categorized as a health research paper, specifically based on its features and conventions. The understanding of these features and conventions of this scholarly academic research paper exemplifies the high-level educational expertise, as well as further comprehends the paper’s operationalized main concepts.

            In most scholarly articles, especially in this health-related paper, presents rhetoric conventions that include a title, authors, key words, abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusion, and citations/references. Through the analysis of these conventions we are able to determine the audience, tone, style, purpose, and context of this paper. Written by educated health-science authors in the Department of Nursing, their use of citations of other research articles, various use of study methods, statistics, as well as styling their paper to be structured with headings of the conventions, convey professionalism and expertise that defines this as a scholarly academic paper. By this observation, we are able to determine the targeted audience members of further health-scientist researchers, nurses, doctors, dieticians and health-studying students. We view the context of this paper to the increasing misperceptions from adolescents of their weight, leading to poor health choices. The concerned and informative tone of this paper is set out to aware individuals of the purpose of this paper– the difference between the real weight and self perceived weight of adolescents, and imply methods for school programs to teach body weight and form, and methods of healthy weight loss.

This concept of adolescents’ misperceptions about weight and practices to lose weight were operationalized through data collection. The gathering of results consisted of distributing a fifteen-question form individually out to 703 year 9-12 students in a high school in the Ankara District in Turkey. The posed evaluative questions asked students about their socio-demographic (age, gender, education), their physical and nutritional habits, and their knowledge of health and weight. Key questions asked, “I believe that my weight is…” with optional answers of underweight, healthy, overweight, and obese, and whether they had previously tried to lose weight, and if yes how they tried. Another important question included, “what methods have you used to lose weight?” given the options of physical activity, diet, herbal, throwing up, and medication. These chosen questions were given before the adolescents were anthropometrically measured. The measurements of the students’ body weight (body mass index) were taken and processed by specialized researchers. Formal results consisted of 11% students underweight, 74% healthy weight, 6.4% overweight, and 8.2% obese. However, the perceptions of these students resulted in 13% who considered themselves underweight, 65% healthy, and 20% overweight.  Statistics of this data further warns the readers about the concerns of these misperceptions.

This scholarly academic paper includes rhetoric conventions and features, which shows the proficiency and credibility of the research paper. The operationalized concept of this paper especially highlights the importance of teaching students the right way of understanding body weight and form, as well as the safe and healthy way of losing weight. This paper advises their targeted audience of health professionals, especially nurses, to have important roles to promote health activities, encouraging life behaviours for weight management. With increasing demands of body image through this generation, these researchers want to inform these adolescents and their parents, as well as improve health professionals’ knowledge of the current adolescents’ perceptions of weight, for overall health improvement in the future.

Thlog Four

On our fourth week, we handed in our final WP1 and started discussing WP2. Learning about the reverse outline was very important for me, as I tend to ramble on in parts of my essays. For editing my future writing, I will use this method to make sure my ideas/paragraphs stay on topic and follow a flowy-good structure. I thought exchanging our papers to reverse outline each other’s paper was very beneficial, as it made me understand the differences in other people’s writing style, which made me further understand general weaknesses and strong points of a paper. Another method I will use in the future is highlighting the main idea, thesis statement, textual evidence, and analysis. This really ‘highlighted’ whether my paper stayed on topic, and the amount as well as effectiveness of textual evidence use. I especially never knew that questions our class thought of for the bonfire with a melted bottle scenario could be categorized into majors. It was extremely fascinating. I very much struggled dividing all given majors into the chosen three groups of humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. I still find it confusing distinguishing majors between humanities and social sciences. The text-as-pig (lab dissection) also made me realize the importance of high- to low-order concerns in papers. I will definitely be using this table to checklist whether I have included the high-order concerns in all my papers. However, I was very surprised seeing that topic sentences were categorized in low-order concerns.

The final activity ‘Mark Smith’s murder’ conducted in class was really interesting. My group (Ace) had to design a coroner’s report, and although none of us have ever really seen a proper coroner’s report, we were able to gather some of the rhetorical features. The textual statements posted were easily distinguishable to what type of role the group had.

Thlog Three

In the third week of Writing 2, we learnt many things in preparation for Writing Project #1. On Monday, the reading of “So what? Who cares? Saying why it matters,” taught me the necessity of engaging why our readers should read our paper. Zack gave us some of really helpful tips and went through the importance of editing before publishing, as well as the differences between dashes and hyphens. From the analysis of what makes a good argument, a good argument, I learnt that arguments should be clear and relatively concise, address counterarguments, and persuasive with the support of evidence and sources. Student 4 argued that South Coast Deli was the best restaurant in IV. This was my favorite argument because I found their reasons very influential as it even persuaded me to believe that it's the best restaurant. We then determined if our thesis statement passed the ‘arguability test,’ and whether it could be proven wrong. From this, I have really learnt that thesis statements are the most important section in all papers. On Wednesday, it was extremely beneficial learning the difference between a “working” thesis statement, and a finalized thesis statement, as I have always struggled with writing thesis statements in the past. When we evaluated the Pancake restaurant menu WP1 sample, it was very helpful for me as it set out a basic outline for my project paper. When we lastly split into groups to peer-review and specifically analyse each other’s introduction and thesis statement, as well as our overall WP1 draft. We mainly looked out for the arguability test of the thesis statement, the so what who cares, and our thoughts on the overall introduction. I believe this was very beneficial, as other perspectives can guide us to re-evaluate our own introduction and thesis statement.