Month: April 2016

Reading Notes “Do We Need More Advice About Eating Well?”

This is an opinion pages “Room for Debate” as the New York Times calls it. Included in this room for debate are multiple authors discussing many topics, or “debaters”. I will specifically look at Yael Lehmann’s piece because she discusses the topic of food availability which I believe has been something very relevant to our class discussions. Lehmann is executive director of “The Food Trust”, a nationally recognized non-profit organization who’s mission is to ensure everyone has access to affordable nutritious food as well as information to make the right decisions.

In this piece, Lehmann does not deny the importance of nutrition education. She realizes the importance for education but also recognizes that if healthy food is not available, people won’t eat it. She see’s this as a ‘common-sense conclusion’. A recent study in New York found that accessibility to supermarkets had a positive and consistent correlation to reduction in obesity.

Lehmann also mentions evidence from a Philadelphia school district in which they replaced junk food in vending machines with options such as 100% juice and healthy snacks. This allowed the students to use the nutritional education from the classroom and apply it to their own lives. “And the result? A documented 50 percent reduction in the incidence of children becoming overweight.”

Yael Lehmann makes a simple, but extremely logical and relevant argument in this piece.

Reading Notes “The Jargon Trap”

David Tuller wrote this piece in the opinion pages of the New York Times as a former student of Public Health at U.C. Berkley. There, he wrote for a general interest magazine. He is now the academic coordinator for UC Berkley’s joint masters program in public health and journalism.

Tuller wrote this article and told a story of his time at Berkley writing for the magazine. He described an article that he thought to be a great piece. His editor thought otherwise. When Tuller reviewed the piece, he saw what his editor was talking about. The piece was “stuffed so full of cumbersome language, weighty arguments and important data” that the good stuff fell off the page. Now, Tuller teaches Journalism students how to write and provides them with 2 rules that he outlines in this piece:

  1. He bans formal references. This works because it makes the writers prove their claims should someone challenge them.
  2. Bans the use of acronyms for a couple of reasons. First, because they can get out of control and second, because some acronyms have multiple meanings.

He also repeats basic rules before each assignment.

  • Tell the most important things first
  • Keep it simple
  • Use the active voice
  • Be Specific
  • Take things piece by piece

Class Notes 4/27/16

Class Notes 4/27/16
Karen: [Speaking about WRT 205 as a whole.] This course will help you tackle research objectives as they come into your professional and personal life. Thats why we have talked so much about intellectual tools that you’ve been using in your writing. (Like, how to incorporate a range of voices surrounding your topics.) [All to help you.]
Reflective Portfolio (DUE FRIDAY 5/6/16)
 
Consists of: ONE document with ALL of the intended assignments for the portfolio. **Turn on Track Changes, use the ‘new comment’ button to attach your own comments of how you used research.** Save as PDF.—DUE NEXT FRIDAY (May 6th)
  1. A retrospective look back on what you have learned.
  2. To be able to asses what you are learning and to see what you have
  3. For you to make that knowledge, reflecting on what you have learned.
HOW TO DO IT:
  1. Grab on to the pieces of writing you have written in this course. 2 or 3 smaller ‘other’ assignments.
  2. Look through the text and annotate them. Figure out what you have learned trough these assignments,
  3. How you chose your sources and work with your sources.
Self Evaluation
(Which will also be attached in the single document holding your whole portfolio)
  • 500-600 words.
  • Focus on how you advanced as a writer in this course.
Unit 3 Projects due Monday by 11:59pm
(Email her anything and she will get back to you on what you can work on.)
DUE MONDAY:
-Unit 3 project (with bibliography attached!
-Review and revision worksheet that was started on class this past Monday.
-ANY MISSING WORK (blank on blackboard) [Not accepting any date after Monday]
-Revision packets (on BB, Revising to Re-See) that can be submitted for extra credit. (UP TO 3 PERCENTAGE POINTS on your Unit 3 Final Project!!! YASSSSS!!!)
Come on Monday with your laptops and textbooks!
Email with ANY questions!

Lessons: ready to use

One of our basic goals for this course has been to learn and practice portable strategies for research-based writing, to accumulate tools and techniques that you can take with you from WRT 205 and apply in various writing situations in your personal, professional, and civic lives. With the semester rapidly drawing to a close, I’d like you to articulate some of those lessons here. There are two reasons for doing this now: looking long term, I’d like you to be able to name what you’ve learned as on your way out the door; in the short term, you’ll need access to some terminology to name the writerly choices you’re making in your current writing project.

In other words, it’s time to actually name and list the tools you’ve learned in this course that you are currently using in writing for this course. You’ll do this as a small group activity in class on Wednesday, 4/27, and will share your list as a comment on this post.

I’ll start: one of the big sets of lessons learned has been that we develop our own ideas by conversing with our sources–by receiving, relating, and responding to the ideas others put forth. When we grab onto those in our own work, we are forwarding, and making that move depends upon coming to terms with and fairly summarizing those thinkers’ words and ideas. So some of the concrete strategies include:

  • critical summary (what a source says)
  • defining a source (what it is and what it does)
  • note-taking (capturing key ideas and your responses to them)

Then, of course, there are a whole bunch of other moves (many of them they say/I say strategies) that you use to actually write with other sources. I could keep listing those here, but I actually want YOU to do that, to tell me what are some of the specific strategies you’ve found most helpful in your own writing?

With your team, get started–brainstorm your list and share as a comment on this post. Feel free to consult the class notes on this blog, as well as your textbooks, and try to be as specific as possible in naming the strategies that we’ve been refining.

Class Notes 4/18

*Work with sources in your draft so that she can give you good feedback

*If you’re using data/numbers, maybe a chart would be better

Two tips for writing for the public:
– Don’t have footnotes/reference page
-Citations are an academic feature, not a writing for the public feature
– Ways to do this:
-“Recent research on the subject, by scholars at ____,”
– “According to the ____”

– Don’t use acronyms
-people don’t know what they mean
-Some acronyms have multiple meanings

-Things that impact whether you’ll read something:
-The length
-Layout
-Can you skim it?
-Language
-Can I understand it?
For Wednesday:
-Chapter 5 of “ReWritting”
-Post draft to class blog by start of class
-Peer review in class
-As an attachment
-Include a quick explanation of retorical situation (audience, publication, etc.)
-Include where youre at in the process (almost done? early draft?)
-Include if theres something that u really want the reviewer to help you with
-Bring laptops

Reading notes Ch. 10 TSIS

Chapter 10 of “They Say/I Say”
• Author Background
o Authors Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
o Their audience is anyone looking to improve their own academic writing skills or are looking to teach others how to right
o The purpose of the whole book is to give everyone equal opportunity to be able to write good quality texts even if they don’t intuitively know how
• Chapter 10 “The Art of Metacommentary”
o Purpose of chapter is to emphasis the importance of explaining you points father after you make them
o Focuses on explaining what metacommentay is and why it is useful
• What is Metacommentary
o It is a way of furthering your points to tell your readers how they should or should not be viewing your information
o Explains the meaning of your big point or main text
o Use it to backup claims and explicitly tell the reader how to interpret the information they were just given
o Title and subtitles are some of the most important metacommentary that gets overlooked very often
• Why do we need it?
o Even if your main text is very clear, the audience can still take it the wrong way
 You could lose the reader in a complex argument that needs more explanation
 Readers could miss the big picture
 Readers could not understand the significance
o If your paper needs to be longer, it adds length and depth
o Could help you think of more ideas and better points hen trying to explain something further
 Makes you analyze your topic more and see new angles