Coming off a long break is never easy, but coming out of a four-day weekend and jumping right into midterms can make getting back into the swing of things especially hard. I can’t say that the wellness days this past week weren’t greatly appreciated, as I’m sure many of us caught up on that oh-so-needed extra bit of sleep, but I will say that this week has proven quite challenging in terms of productivity. The majority of my midterms were split up between the past two weeks with the wellness days wedged right in the middle, something I still haven’t decided to be a blessing or a curse. However, after these midterms started winding down, it was awfully rewarding to look back and realize how far into this semester we’ve actually come.
We’re now almost nearing the completion of Unit 2 in English as we take a look into writing in the social health sciences. We’ve just about finalized our Feeder 2.2 presentation proposals, and after some beneficial peer review, I left feeling substantially more confident in my ability to draft a concise and effective abstract. In our perusal of scholarly articles and research journals during previous units of the class, these concise synopses always seemed to be one of the common features seen across every paper. Prior to this unit, I had no idea how vital certain components were to an abstract – whether it was explaining the gaps in research that you’re working to fill or developing a research question to highlight within your writing. I always read abstracts as if they were just a simple summary of the article, but this past week has undoubtedly changed my perspective on this. In all honesty, I couldn’t be happier that we had so much time to really hunker down on what I think is a crucial part of writing in health and will certainly be a crucial part of my future writing.
We’re currently in the midst of preparing for our final Unit 2 Project – a conference presentation geared towards discussing a major health injustice within North Carolina. This is one of those projects that I think really enables students to bring out the areas that they are passionate about within Healthcare, especially given that we’re able to select our own topics for writing in this course. Delving into the injustices of the North Carolina Medicaid system and the divisions by healthcare by income has undoubtedly come as a shock to me, and though it seems that we always know these inequities are out there, you never really get a true sense of how impactful they are until you truly take the time to dig a little deeper as we’ve been doing in this project.
In our Thursday class for English this week, we also got the opportunity to take a look into diction, style, and tone for different models of health justice studies. Given that we’re on the verge of presenting our own, I think it was definitely worthwhile to take a look into the writing choices that true health justice authors use to enhance their writing and get their points across. One of the things that a lot of us seemed to observe in these articles was the integration of an empathetic tone with writing that’s clearly objective and science-driven, so this is something I’ll definitely be working to apply in my own project.
Now that we’re halfway into this semester, I’ve been asking myself if I feel like I’m improving as a student and a writer, and honestly, I feel like I can confidently say that I am. It’s always difficult to measure your progress in a course like English where improvement doesn’t necessarily seem tangible, but all the work we’ve been doing with stylistic writing that I’ve never been exposed to before has actually helped me feel like I’m finally taking a new approach to English. On an unfortunate side note, UNC’s basketball season came to an end this week against Wisconsin, so I’m definitely looking forward to some more positives to make up for this in the weeks to come. And, for all the students reading this, just remember, we’re more than halfway there!
Featured Image Source
Drake, Jonathan. (2018). Students walk past Wilson Library on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [Digital photograph]. Reuters. Retrieved March 23, 2021, from
https://www.reuters.com/innovative-universities-2018/profile?uid=9