Author: Laura Weiland

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

Paper Topic

I am researching how hospice care can benefit the families of the residents to depict to hospice centers how important it is to prioritize the families as well as the resident and to inform perspective residents on some of the advantages choosing hospice could hold for them. My target audience would be the hospice centers themselves and anyone interested making a future plan for end-of-life care. I believe it is very important for people to know their options and be informed about the pros and cons choosing hospice and to let hospice centers know what they are doing that is good and what could be improved upon. As morbid of an outlook as this is, everyone is going to die so it is beneficial for everyone to know about hospice as an option when the time comes. I think this essay will turn into more of an informational essay with a call to action to make hospice care centers even more prepared to help families deal with grief. I could also do a compare and contrast between the benefits that hospice centers have on families verses the benefit hospitals have on families.

Chapter 7 TSIS Reading Notes

• Chapter 7 of “They Say/I Say”
• Authors Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
• Their audience is anyone looking to improve their own academic writing skills or are looking to teach others how to right
• 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.
• The purpose of this chapter is to tell why it is important to tell the audience why you are writing about the subject and how it applies to (“so what” and “who cares”)
• This chapter focuses on various moves and templates to use in order to explain to the reader why your topic is significant
• Readers need to know why they should care
• Even if you think your reasons are obvious, you should explain why anyway
• A big problem of speakers are that they don’t address the question of why their argument matters and then loses the interest of their audience because it lacks relevance
• “who cares”: asks you to identify a person or group that cares about what you are saying
• “so what”: asks about real-world applications and consequences to give it relevance
• Best way to show larger role your claims make is to relate it to something you know the audience already cares about
• Very important to just be explicit about it, get to the point

Documentary reflection

The filmmakers presented the majority of their research in a way that was intended to appeal to the audience’s pathos. They followed the lives of several families from all over the United States to show that the problem is widespread. We got to see where and how they lived as well as hear firsthand from the parents and kids about their struggles with food insecurity. They showed the hunger problems and health problems associated with it by having children speak and be shown at the doctor’s office. This all pulls of the viewer’s emotions and made the video more relatable and impactful. They also presented facts very clearly. When they had a statistic, it would be put up of the screen in big letters and be made the focus at that time. They also used visuals like graphs and charts. One example I found pretty impactful was when they showed the rise in food insecurity throughout the terms of the different presidents. They would show video of the presidents speaking about wanting to help the problem but at the bottom of the screen show the number of insecure people in America rising by the millions. They used interviews with people to back up the claims and fact that they had just presented. One part I found very effective was when they were following this woman with two kids who was on food stamps. She finally got a job and was so happy to have one but because of that, she lost her food assistance. She had to struggle and worry about feeding her kids more when she had a job than when she was on food stamps. Also, they really did a good job at showing that obesity and food security go hand in hand. They used children and really good visuals to show that the cheap things to ge with little money are the very unhealthy, processed foods. They even interviewed a person that works for food assistance that tried to live off of a food stamp budget. He only could make it one week because he couldn’t buy healthy things of get enough food to last him the week. Overall, I believe that this film did a really good job of presenting their ideas and backing it up with first hand interviews and visuals the appeal to the audience emotions.

Class Notes 2/29

• Quoting
o Need to have sufficient context!
 Just placing quotes into your writing (orphan quotes) does not make it clear enough to the reader what the quote means in regards to your topic/main idea
o Keep the ideas attached to the people, make it clear why you’re saying it
 Quotation sandwich:
• Introduce the quote (author, type of publication, why that quote)
• Say the quote
• Interpretation of the quote ( give explanations, tie it together with your point to make sure the reader understands what you were intending them to get out of it)
o Your job is to give the quote meaning
• How to decide to quote vs. paraphrase
o If the language of what you’re quoting is central to what you are talking about, you need to quote
o If you don’t want to be associated with the quote of have people confuse you as the person saying it
o If someone says something so elegantly that you don’t want to alter it at all
o Honestly, it’s a judgment call by you as a writer
 Need to consider emphasis (use sparingly, no more than 1 per page as a general rule)
 ONLY QUOTE WHEN YOU HAVE A REASON TO DO SO
 IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THE QUOTE, DON’T USE IT!
• How to take notes
o Look at handout
o Use intentional effort and give what you are reading some thought
• To do for Wednesday
o Take notes in an intentional method on your article and email it
o Make a quotation sandwich for a quote from the article

In class assignment 2/22

1. I am interested in how end-of-life care is incorporated into public health as well as its effect on the loved ones of the person that is terminal. I’m also curious to see how income effects the availability of ideal end-of-life care situations.
2. End-of-life-care, family members, problems, terminal, hospice, public health, poverty, conditions, hospital, palliative
3. Author: Jeroen Hasselaar and Sheila Payne
Title: Moving the integration of palliative care from idea to practice
Place of publication: Sage Journals
Url: http://pmj.sagepub.com/content/30/3/197.full

4. This article is basically a call-to-action. The author present was resources and ideas we have available to improve care for terminal people and say that there is a need. They point out that although some measures have been taken, we need to and can take more. The authors use the “borrowing technique” by siting many other sources in their article. They us the sources to support their claims that there is more we need to do and that we know what to do next. There isn’t really much illustrating being done because he doesn’t in my opinion really inforce the fact that this is a problem. Extending is used a little when they use their sources to try to prove that there is something that we could do that we aren’t.

Publc Heath Issues Due to Geography

“The Poverty Problem in Syracuse: Matt’s Memo
This article points out that the thoughtless design of the city of Syracuse has been a large contributor to the prevalence of poverty. The layout of the city, especially the interstate, has divided Syracuse into sections and caused isolation and increased poverty problems. A quote that stood out to me was by Valerie Hill who said, “Poverty was designed to happen. It does not happen just because. It was written into the plan.” I thought that was a pretty powerful statement and definitely pointed fingers at the setup of the city as being one of the root causes that allowed Syracuse to get so bad.
http://cnycentral.com/news/local/the-poverty-problem-in-syracuse-matts-memo

“The Cancer Correlation”
This article postulates the correlation between radioactivity in the Colombian River and cancer rates in the Oregon counties bordering the river. Researchers noticed that starting from the Hartford Plant and continuing downstream, cancer rates were higher in the areas next to the river and highest particularly around the lower Colombian. I chose to look at Oregon because both my aunt and uncle who live in Port Land have been recently diagnosed with Cancer and the discussion in class made me wonder if the environment there led to them both having it.
http://www.intimeandplace.org/Hanford/activities/cancercorrelation.html