From e2d11024d8ab3a5c486017d5b23fef5aaa8fcf03 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Holden Rohrer Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2020 18:57:31 -0500 Subject: i'm giving up on the cover essay 114 words left, but they'd be trash anyway. too tired to think. --- markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html | 101 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 100 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'markley/portfolio') diff --git a/markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html b/markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html index f27a370..90648c1 100644 --- a/markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html +++ b/markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html @@ -110,4 +110,103 @@ and the workplace. - +

+The references I'm creating in the digital reading journal feeds into +the reading responses, which are essentially final artifacts. +The reading responses are one to three page essays about how the content +and concepts in books we've read for class relate to health as a +collection of social ideals. +The reading responses are exercises in critical thinking, and those +ideas are channeled into an argumentative essay. +The questions are phrased such that a student must take a stance like +"strangeness is a sign of moral contradiction" (the stance I took in +the first reading response) and defend it. +Rhetoric is useful here, and tailoring the language style to the +audience and the situation means a formal style of argument where +organization is critical. +

+

+ +Organizing the essay means ordering the ideas, with transitions, inside +paragraphs and selecting the right subtopics to focus on creates a much +stronger argument for the thesis of the essay, and the revision +activities are about this aspect of text organization. +They build on the reading response essays by asking students to review +the paragraph structure (in terms of abstraction from direct evidence to +general claims) and how well those paragraphs put the argument forward. +With unlimited time, I might have improved my reading response essays +further with these techniques, but these are valuable to me going +forwards as a formulaic way to review part of the quality of an essay's +rhetoric +

+The reading responses are process documents in one other way: they are a +segment of the semester-long process to fully understand the ideal of +health. +This course introduced me to this incredibly comprehensive system of +"process," and I think it's an incredibly useful lens for writing and +research, so I will try to frame larger writing projects I have in terms +of a more effective process than "just write it." +

+The Process and Rhetoric Outcomes are very important for developing a +presentable piece, but the major ideas of the course are backed by the +Critical Thinking Outcome. +Health is one possible lens for social analysis, but it's a particularly +wide-reaching one because health is essentially a linguistic proxy for +social norms---the healthful is the socially normative. +However, the power dynamics (black-white, female-male) we studied are +general rather than medicine-specific, and analyzing society through the +lens of privileged and unprivileged. +One tool for reviewing social systems that I found very valuable from +this course is how culture pervades language and reflects the status +quo. +See the portrayal of Hyde as disgusting, hideous, and unhealthy +in the first Reading Response as an example. +This portrayal reflects a culture which views moral virtues as first and +foremost to leading a good life. +Hyde, the person made of pure evil, was a murderer and a thief, which +makes him an unhealthy person---which is why a drug regime and eventual +demise are associated with the indiscretion of becoming Hyde, like a +poetic punishment. +

+ +

+The specific theme of health is fairly domain-specific, but these +modes of thinking are general. +When an author talks about a character or any other element of the story +with language like Robert Louis Stevenson uses, it is clear that the +character is meant to be a figure of whatever the author considers to be +ultimate evil, which differs culturally. +I also analyze language in the second reading response essay, but I use +it to talk about the implied social claim against experimenters from +The Island of Dr. Moreau to argue about the experimenter's +psychology or at least the public perception thereof is one tied down to +rules-based thinking. +I argue that the reason experimenters don't become Dr. Moreau vivisector +types is that they are bound by laws, threats to remove funding, and +strict social norms on consent. +I use the implied moral feeling on experimenters of The Island +to disambiguate why doctors abuse African-American patients the way they +do according to Medical Apartheid. +I conjoined these analyses with a third argument about the nature of +experiment to show that experimenters, by default, want the most control +they can have over their experiments, and ethical concerns take a +backseat. +

+ +

+ -- cgit