Introduction

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
This assignment asks students to write a formal essay about health and readings related to ideas about health.
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."
Dr. Markley or a general academic reader. more formal than blog posts. designed to be practice with argumentative writing.
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.