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<p>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 <a href="https://
sites.gatech.edu/wcppolicies/engl-1101-and-1102-common -policies-fall
-2020/">set of common objectives</a> 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.</p>
<iframe src="https://classblogs20.iac.gatech.edu/holdenr/" width=800
height=400 frameborder=0></iframe>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<iframe src="https://classblogs20.iac.gatech.edu/holdenr/2020/10/23/
hela-and-henrietta/" width=800 height=400 frameborder=0></iframe>
<p>
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
<a href="https://sites.gatech.edu/wcppolicies/engl-1101-and-1102-common
-policies-fall-2020">Rhetoric Learning Outcome.</a>
</p>
<table>
<thead><tr>
    <td width=158><p><strong>Category</strong></p>
    <td width=158><p><strong>Outcomes by the USG Board of Regents</strong></p>
    <td width=158><p><strong>Outcomes by the Council of Writing Program
    Administrators</strong></p>
    <td width=158><p><strong>Additional Expectations of the GTWCP
    </strong></p>
</tr></thead>
<tbody><tr>
<td width="158" valign="top">
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Rhetoric</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Rhetoric focuses on available means of
persuasion, considering the synergy of factors such as context,
audience, purpose, role, argument, organization, design, visuals, and
conventions of language.</p>
</td>
<td width="158" valign="top">
<ul>
<li style="text-align: left;">Adapt communication to circumstances and
audience.</li>
<li style="text-align: left;">Produce communication that is
stylistically appropriate and mature.</li>
<li style="text-align: left;">Communicate in standard English for
academic and professional contexts.</li>
<li style="text-align: left;">Sustain a consistent purpose and point of
view.</li>
</ul>
</td>
<td style="text-align: left;" width="158" valign="top">
<ul>
    <li>Use a variety of technologies to address a range of
    audiences.</li>
    <li>Learn common formats for different kinds of texts.</li>
    <li>Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure
    and paragraphing to tone and mechanics.</li>
    <li>Control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation,
    and spelling.</li>
</ul>
</td>
<td width="158" valign="top">
<ul>

<li style="text-align: left;">Create artifacts that demonstrate the
synergy of rhetorical elements.</li>
<li style="text-align: left; background-color: yellow">Demonstrate
adaptation of register, language, and conventions for specific contexts
and audiences.</li>
<li style="text-align: left;">Apply strategies for communication in and
across both academic disciplines and cultural contexts in the community
and the workplace.</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<!--
    What kind of rhetoric is required for the essay? How is it different
    from the digital reading journal?
    What changes could I have made to fit the rhetoric better in either
    one?
    ?How could I have improved my process?
        Talk a lot more about the revision activities.
    Hmm..what is the kind of understanding that I develop with health?
    As a proxy for social norms, what does that tell me about general
    critical analysis?
    Okay so this class has taught me about analyzing the implicit claims
    and social structures. Also "language, knowledge, and power"
-->
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
</p><p>
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."
</p><p>
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 <em>unhealthy</em>
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.
</p>
<iframe src="https://hrhr.dev/essayone" height=600 width=800></iframe>
<p>
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
<em>The Island of Dr. Moreau</em> 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 <em>The Island</em>
to disambiguate why doctors abuse African-American patients the way they
do according to <em>Medical Apartheid</em>.
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.
</p>
<iframe src="https://hrhr.dev/markley/essaytwo"></iframe>
<p>
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that you acquired, in relation both to the course outcomes and to your
own priorities as a student.
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