Tag: Reading Notes

Reading Notes: The Do-It-Yourself Approach to Food

The author of this text is Will Allen, which is the CEO of Growing Power, a non-profit that aims to provide equal access to healthy food. His audience is anyone that is passionate or cares about healthy eating on a public health scale. His purpose is to inform and to persuade his audience about his views, and he is writing because the question “Do we need more advice about eating well?” was asked.

The basic argument is that there is always a need to educate america on healthy eating, but we should instead focus on educating the people on how to grow their own healthy foods. Instead of leaving it there, he then gave clear advice on how the argument could be supported by the community through many examples.

Reading Notes –Chapter 1: Rewriting

This chapter was a brief introduction to very useful tools we would utilize in this writing class such as coming to terms, forwarding, countering, taking an approach, and revising. It gave a sneak peak of what each tool was and how the writer can use these tools when writing a text. Each of these tools has a unique role and are used differently for different purposes. The audience is intended for anyone who wants to learn about certain writing techniques that they can incorporate in their own writing. They accomplished their purpose in which we know that they were able to teach the readers about these techniques. These techniques have definitely helped me formulate my ideas clearly and using other sources in a way where I am incorporating them and adding value to my projects this semester.

Reading Notes– Improving End-of-Life Care: A Public Health Call to Action

Hess’s article was one of the first readings we closely analyzed at the beginning of the semester. This reading gave me a good glimpse of what was going to be expected while doing research in this class when annotating the text. Hess argued the importance of end of life care is and how crucial it is for people to start paying more attention to it. In class, we figured out why the author was writing this text and what her exigence was. The author was writing this paper as a dissertation to her capstone so she has a reason to argue about end of life care. Her audience in mainly intended for policy makers, end of life patients/families, and anyone who is interested in knowing about topics like this. She uses a unique way of capturing the reader’s attention by incorporating a loved one in her dissertation.

Reading Notes for “We Need Better Information About Nutrition”

This article was written in the opinion section of the NY Times as part of a debate series on whether we need more advice as a country on how to eat well. It was written by Marion Nestle who works in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She has also written a book and has a blog about food politics. She wrote this piece so people would be motivated to try and do something about what foods are available. When it comes down to it these are things that policymakers and government officials need to start looking at and doing something about.

She believes that Americans definitely need more information about eating well and that our obesity problem is proof of that. Often times people get conflicting advice because everyone wants their product to sell so they say it is the best. Food companies want to sell as much food as possible so they can make the largest profit possible. It is hard for people to resist food when it is sold everywhere they go. The basic principles for healthy eating are easily said, but hard to actually follow.

She believes we need to change the environment that food is available in so people can make healthier decisions. One of the problems is that fresh produce is so expensive making it hard for people to afford to eat healthy. She emphasizes that the farm bill needs to be fixed so these things can happen.

Reading Notes for “The Jargon Trap”

This piece was written by David Tuller in the opinion section of the NY Times. He is a writer and academic coordinator at UC: Berkeley in their joint masters program in public health and journalism. He wrote this particular article with the purpose of helping the reader move away from academic writing so they can address a larger audience.

He started thinking about this while in grad school after he submitted an article he thought was very good to his editor. The comments he received were that it was extremely dull and there was nothing she could do to fix it. He realized he had put too much jargon in it and there was no way regular people would be able to follow it and understand his points. Once he became an instructor he wanted to help students with the transition between academic writing and writing for everyday people.

His first rule for doing this is to forget formal references, which means no footnotes or bibliography. This is because most readers will not care which journal published what or the exact specifics from the article. You can use the general ideas from the sources, just do not specifically cite them. His second rule is no acronyms. This can be confusing for a reader who is not familiar with certain acronyms academics have come up with. They can also have multiple meaning sometimes, which can also be confusing. He has found that people who use these techniques actually feel freed in their writing and are able to get their ideas across better.

He also shares his basic rules, which are as follows:

  1. Share the most important thing first, then tell the rest of the story
  2. Keep it simple
  3. Use the active voice
  4. Be specific
  5. Take things piece by piece

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

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