Unit 1: Writing in the Natural Sciences | Writing at the Research University, Fall 2022, Sections 054 and 065

For this unit, students will compose a popular health article for a major news source of their choosing. Health and medical professionals are often asked to translate complex, jargon-heavy information to non-specialist audiences, including patients with varying literacy levels, advocacy groups, policy makers, drug company advertising executives, and more. This unit requires students to become an expert at reading and interpreting professional journal articles. They will attend to many different ethical concerns, including how to persuasively and honestly present visual data. We use http://www.healthnewsreview.org/ as a guide for studying health and medical journalism.

As the first unit in our semester, this project exposes students to conducting secondary research on a topic related to health or medicine. They are exposed to the methods through which knowledge is disseminated throughout the Natural Sciences and how such information gets transmitted to non-expert audiences. During this unit, we work with an instructional librarian from the Undergraduate Library (UL) at UNC who introduces students to the various research resources at UNC, specifically the extensive databases the UNC Libraries provides.

This introductory unit also serves as a way to ease students into ENGL 105. In later units, students will begin to conduct their own primary research and construct their own claims. This unit first allows students to prioritize secondary research, so they are comfortable collecting, evaluating, and integrating outside sources, translating other scholars’ ideas before they begin to craft their own arguments.

For more information, see the Unit 1 Assignment Prompt, which should be accompanied by the Preliminary Research Worksheet and the Article Proposal Worksheet.

And of course, be sure to explore the students’ completed popular health articles. In the menu for “Categories,” choose “Natural Sciences: Popular Health Articles” and look for the appropriate section to access their articles, or you can just click here for Section 054 and click here for Section 065.