This artifact includes three reading response essays and revision
activities corresponding to each one on different structural strategies.
The Reading Response Essays assess critical thinking and rhetoric by
asking questions about "health" through the books we read in class.
Health is a set of social ideals generally designed as "preventive
medicine" but deeply influenced by the culture that created them.
The reading response essays (without revision activity updates) are
listed below along with the corresponding revision activities
Reading Response Essay One
Prompt:The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, as the title indicates, refers to Dr. Jekyll’s experiments,
behavior, and transformation as "strange." Likewise, The Sign of Four
ends with a chapter entitled "The Strange Story of Jonathan Small."
Explain what "strange" means in these two texts, using direct quotations
from both texts, references to historical context, and ideas we have
discussed about "health" to support your argument.
Uneven-U
The Uneven U asks me to choose two paragraphs and look at each
sentence to see how "abstracted" it is from a direct quote up to a
general statement about health.
I commented on each sentence and then rewrote both of the paragraphs I
chose to get a desired "somewhat abstract to most concrete to very
abstract" curve.
Reading Response Essay Two
Prompt: Claude Bernard defines the experiment as "an
observation induced with an object of control." Discuss how
experimentation relates to the social ideal of health. Use direct
evidence from The Island of Dr. Moreau and Medical Apartheid, historical
context, and ideas about health to support your argument. You may
include examples from other texts we have read, but your primary focus
should be the readings from the past two weeks.
Reverse Outline
This is about creating an outline from what I've already written that
tells the main argument: the main idea and how a given paragraph
advances the central argument is enough to tell when a paragraph's
message is muddled, which is the point of this argument.
I have continued to focus on this cohesiveness within a paragraph in my
writing because of this activity.
Reading Response Essay Three
Prompt: In the first lecture on health, I discussed
how new technologies that help to measure and perceive the the "health"
of the human body create new rules, regulations, and norms that govern
"health." Using either "The Yellow Wallpaper" or The Immortal Life
of Henrietta Lacks explain how new technologies, treatments, or
ideas for measuring "health" lead to new rules, regulations, and norms.
I strongly encourage you to refer back to the first lecture to help you
consider this relationship between technology and health.
Active Voice Revision Activity
This revision activity asks students to review their third essay for
sentences written in passive voice and change them to active voice.
This makes the writing more clear and correct.
This one is pretty simple, so I want to keep up avoiding passive voice
in my future writing.
Goals
These assignments ask students to develop a strong academic
argument about how health and other social constructions like
experiments or technology relate.
Developing these ideas is part of the
Critical Thinking learning outcome, in the sense that they
require analysis of the indirect statements literature makes, like
Jonathan Small's "strangeness" referring to his nonconformance with
social norms.
Purpose
Each essay asks students to write a formal argument about health
and readings related to ideas about health.
These essays are artifacts, demonstrating a trained interpretation
of the stories in terms of health, and continuing to develop
understanding of medicine and the social ideal.
Then, the revision assignments corresponding to each reading
response encourage improvement in an iterative revision on the
structural elements of the essay.
The Uneven-U is about improving the paragraph structure, the Reverse
Outline the overall structure of the essay, and the Active Voice
activity is for individual sentences' structure.
This type of format writing is standard in academia, so it's
valuable to develop the skill of catering to the standard, but it
also provides for more consistent revision processes because of the
consistency.
Audience
The audience for these is a general academic audience, who is
very familiar with the course material, including the variety of
concepts of health.
Because the audience should already understand the basics I don't
include explanations of health and try to avoid book summaries.
However, niche terms with potentially multiple meanings are defined
if used, like "scientific racism" or "evolutionary Darwinism."
Design for Medium
The essay isn't very "multimodal," squarely occupying the
"Writing" communication mode, and it's formal writing at that.
This requires a fairly consistent structure, in the MLA format and
in the organization.
The MLA format is the 12pt, double-spaced Times New Roman required
of most standard essays, and there is the single MLA8 citation
standard.
This is because the essays lean heavily on direct quotes from the
pieces we're analyzing, so the regimented page number references are
useful to an academic reader wanting more context.
Structurally, these essays fit a pretty standard academic essay---an
introduction, conclusion, and body paragraphs divided up by their
topic.
As the revision activities show, this structure is somewhat flexible
(i.e. can be done poorly), but the organization matters, and I can
improve it by paying attention to whether each paragraph makes a
convincing point towards the central argument.
I usually don't do outlining when I'm writing, but I think I am
going to use the reverse outline to compensate for my rambling
tendencies.
Revision
Particularly in the first reading response essay, I struggled
with organizing my ideas.
Despite a coherent thesis that I still believe, I tried to
incorporate different information that did not correspond with my
argument (or at least I didn't develop how it did).
My mention of Holmes's cocaine addiction is not well-addressed or
contextualized in terms of Jonathan Smalls, but it seems to relate
to the idea of health, so I decided to include it.
Ideas like that could probably be trimmed down and replaced.
My paragraphs in the first reading response essay also don't follow
Uneven-U very well.
If I repair the sentence order to fully develop the central argument
about contradiction, they will probably come off as more insightful
than they are now, with a quote (the lowest level of abstraction)
as the second-to-last sentence.
The revision activities helped me to see what exactly "poorly
organized" refers to and how paragraphs can be deliberately
constructed rather than accumulate ideas based on topic.