We began this week with an interesting technique. We explored the idea that to effectively write sci-fi movies, we must first see a sci-fi movie, a technique we paralleled to begin work on our first unit project, the popular health article. This method is great because it allows us to create an effective framework based on previous models to write an article close to the genre’s true pieces. This idea reminded me of a famous quote by Quentin Tarantino: “When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films’” (Walker). It additionally reminded me of art reproduction, a method in which art students recreate popular, or historical, art pieces to understand why certain practices were used in the creation of original artworks.
By reverse engineering the examples of the popular health articles we were provided, our class’ process of writing our own popular articles in an effective, or even more effective, manner is far better informed. My group and I were assigned the article, “A Low-Cost Method to Detect the Toxins in Your ‘Detox Tea’”. The first thing I noticed to be quite interesting in the article was its title as it used contradictory words, “toxins” and “detox”, to hook the reader instead of using a traditional hook as the first sentence. However, the article uses a lot of jargon related to the methodology that is not completely fleshed out. A way to work around this in our popular health articles is to establish the terminology early so that the jargon can be referenced throughout the remainder of the article while discussing our respective study of choice’s methods and results.
While we as a class reverse engineered frameworks of existing articles for our own popular health articles to fit the genre, it is equally as important that through our writing we maintain correct grammar to effectively communicate the information in the article as well. As a class, we were tasked individually to send in examples of grammatical or spelling errors. This was a fun activity to view how syntactical error can contribute to definitions forking from their intention. In class, we looked at several examples of sentences that could be interpreted in different ways due to omitting prepositions, pronouns, or punctuation. An important piece of punctuation we reviewed was the semicolon, used to separate items in a list that contain commas themselves or to combine two individual clauses. I found that semicolons are tools that can allow ideas across independent clauses to flow continuously; however, it is important that they are not overused because they can create unwanted, and unintended, run-on sentences.
As we write our rough drafts of the popular health article, the class as a whole will have the opportunity to apply both the reversed engineered frameworks we developed and grammatical constructs in conjunction with our feedback to Feeder 1.2. In my feedback for Feeder 1.2, I found that CSE style citations are quite meticulous and I must include the page numbers of the journal articles used because it would allow the reader to easily reference portions of the journal that are being cited. CSE style citations being meticulous is warranted because it is a construct generally used in the scientific discipline; therefore, the readers knowing exactly where the information is being obtained is vital to establish credibility in scientific writing. My popular health article for Unit Project One is about the impact maternal touch has on infants. The target demographic for such an article would be mothers of infants due to the fact that the broader implications of the article are that parenting techniques should prioritize positive, physical interaction with children. Therefore, making sure citations are accurate in such a setting is important because the target audience should believe the article is credible, have the opportunity to find the cited information for themselves, and trust the purpose of the article as a whole.
References:
Walker, Andrew. Faces of the week. BBC News, 14 May 2004.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3712013.stm.
Featured Image Source:
Alvin, John. “Final Poster of Blade Runner.” [“Blade Runner” (1982) film poster]. John Alvin
Art, 1982.
https://johnalvinart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Blade-Runner-movie-poster.jpg.
