This English 1102 course asked students to consider how health functions as a social ideal and regulates our actions based on the norms, attitudes, and ideas that prevail in our culture. In addition to this course-specific theme, there is a set of common objectives that this course was designed to teach, developing a Writing Process with revision, synthesis, and drafting and rhetorically effective presentation for distinct audiences and contexts. Revision and research play a large role in developing ideas and arguments and making the arguments robust. While this recursive, iterative process played a role in every assignment, the digital reading journal is the primary source of process documents.

Assigned prompts in the reading journal correspond to class readings and ask students to develop arguments and ideas based on course material. Sourcing and eventual finetuning of these ideas both play a role in the journal: in most entries, we were asked to use quotes and references from both class material and pop culture or general research. This is especially visible in the final post ("Medical Devices, the DMCA, and the corporate profit motive"), where I used links to other websites to make it a better document to refer back to later. Images and analysis also emphasized the role of the digital reading journal as a process document for my analysis of specific works or the overall health theme. But each entry also marks my progress in the general skills of analysis and rhetoric, especially. The electronic form factor has unique norms and options to elaborate, like a less formalistic style and heavy image presence, and these can change the rhetorical strategy I use when sectioning and emphasis are much more fluent than an essay.

The use of images actually enhances my analysis, too, because I'm responding to the ideas that another work provides, and if I can directly include that work, it becomes much easier to speak about since the audience is meant to refer back to it and familiarize themselves. When the audience is me, this anchors my ideas to a specific factual reference, like the timeline in "HeLa and Henrietta."

Quotes and the use of photos to highlight what's important is particular to the electronic medium, and it's particularly valuable when creating a personal reference piece. This is one example of shifting language and presentation towards the desired audience and situation, which is one of the major points of the Rhetoric Learning Outcome.

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.