WP3 Children's Book (as a powerpoint)

       The article I selected was Mass Coral Reef Bleaching: A Recent Outcome of Increased El Niño Activity? published by Ecology Letters in 1999. This article focuses on the past patterns of coral bleaching and the pattens of el nino events, explaining there is a major connection between the two due to the loss of zooxanthellae, a small organism that lives mutualistically with the coral. The little organism can’t live in warm water and thus dies when el nino occurs. El nino is simplistically known as a serge of warm water and tropical storms. As the warm water kills the organism the coral looses its color, turns white, and becomes very fragile/susceptible to diseases. It only is able to recover when something like la nina, a serge of cold water, allows for the organism to thrive in the coral again. The coral then returns to its colorful, healthy state.  This information is what I want to bring to the surface and convey to the audience.

 

The Link to it

WP3 Web Md Page

         The article I selected was Mass Coral Reef Bleaching: A Recent Outcome of Increased El Niño Activity? published by Ecology Letters in 1999. This article focuses on the past patterns of coral bleaching and the pattens of el nino events, explaining there is a major connection between the two due to the loss of zooxanthellae, a small organism that lives mutualistically with the coral. The little organism can’t live in warm water and thus dies when el nino occurs. El nino is simplistically known as a serge of warm water and tropical storms. As the warm water kills the organism the coral looses its color, turns white, and becomes very fragile/susceptible to diseases. It only is able to recover when something like la nina, a serge of cold water, allows for the organism to thrive in the coral again. The coral then returns to its colorful, healthy state.  This information is what I want to bring to the surface and convey to the audience.

The Link to it

WP3 reflection

Reflection:

Thlogg Week 8

This week in class we focused on how to summarize information as well as how to transform one genre into another. To do a transformation we need to look at the conventions of both the genre we are given and the genre we are trying to create. By picking the overlapping pieces and transforming others to fit within it we are able to most effectively transform from one genre to another. We were asked to pick any topic for our WP3 in an attempt to make this project easier, but this actually made it more difficult for me. I ended up just picking something I was learning about in class, coral bleaching, which I do find interesting so it turned out fine in the end. The hardest challenge I face with the topic of coral bleaching is finding genres that will be interesting and possible to transform it into. I do not find something  like a Facebook post or a blog to be something that I would want to create as I am not someone who is super creative in this way. Zack doesn’t seem to like my idea much of the magazine or news article as it isn’t creative, but I find it to be the most effective way to transform the genre of academic article to a newspaper article. I could also try to transform it into a Web MD page like my other classmates and talk about the health of the coral, all coral bleaching the sickness that the page is about. This would be much more interesting and I think Zack would like this much better, hell I like it a lot better and as long as I don’t have too much trouble with the formatting to make it look like a Web MD page I might just do this instead. Learning how to pick apart genres has been key to this assignment and knowing the required conventions of one I am transforming it into are also important. Honestly I never thought knowing this much about genres would be this important but now that I’ve been forced to learn it I find it crucial to understanding texts I encounter. It will be interesting to see how the rest of this class turns out.

PB3A

After way too many hours searching and reading I’ve decided to pick the topic of coral bleaching. The article I selected was Mass Coral Reef Bleaching: A Recent Outcome of Increased El Niño Activity? published by Ecology Letters in 1999. This article focuses on the past patterns of coral bleaching and the pattens of el nino events, explaining there is a major connection between the two due to the loss of zooxanthellae, a small organism that lives mutualistically with the coral. The little organism can’t live in warm water and thus dies when el nino occurs. El nino is simplistically known as a serge of warm water and tropical storms. As the warm water kills the organism the coral looses its color, turns white, and becomes very fragile/susceptible to diseases. It only is able to recover when something like la nina, a serge of cold water, allows for the organism to thrive in the coral again. The coral then returns to its colorful, healthy state.  This information is what I want to bring to the surface and convey to the audience.

Since coral bleaching is caused in mainly by the warm waters of El Nino but can begin to be reversed by la nina, creating something within a young age group will be a challenge with these large scientific ideas. For the adult audience I was thinking of writing something similar to the short articles found in papers such as the L.A Times, Times Magazine, or a newspaper article. This would be about one page long at most, just to sum up the larger ideas since that is what is found within these genres. There is a lack of explicit scientific language and talk of data found in other research. In this magazine/online article or short newspaper piece, I would simply summarize the information within the article. This would include a brief description of the study that was done, the data that was found, and what it all means in terms of the bleaching of the coral reefs around the world. I also plan to include an explanation of the difference between el nino and la nina as they both have vastly different but equally important effects on the coral reefs and are central to understanding the material from the article I found. This would only be appropriate for an adult audience as it does not seek to entertain but rather to inform. This would be lacking the colorful images and creative word play I hope to be able to include in the piece for a younger audience. I have trouble coming up with something more “creative” for an adult audience such as the one that I am envisioning. For the newspaper piece I imagine people in their 40s who are concerned about the problems in the world the live in as someone with an interest in science would be most likely to read the article. 

The piece that is directed towards a younger audience would likely have to be at a more educated young audience such as children 5-6th grade. A background in the basic concepts of science is needed to truly understand what is going on. To target this audience something with pictures of healthy coral and unhealthy coral would be necessary so they can see the difference, as well as captions with them that say what makes coral healthy and unhealthy. This could be a kind of poster that ties in the information from the article. Something to target an even younger audience could be a simple picture book, this would require finding pictures that are colorful and simple for children, preferably cartoonish. In this book there could be a little story about how the coral gets sick (aka white, fragile) from the warm water called el nino, but when la nina comes back the coral gets healthy and colorful again. A road block with this option would be the images used as they would be difficult to find. If anything realistic pictures could suffice, they would just have to be simplistic to show the difference between the healthy and not healthy coral. Drawing attention to the amount of fish on each kind could help this problem as children may be able to understand that if the coral isn’t healthy the fish wont live on it anymore. This project for the younger audience will be a bit of a challenge.

Thlogg week 7

This week in class we focused a bit more on moves and then began to move towards our wp3. This class had flown by I can't believe it's almost over! Wp2 was interesting I'm not sure that I liked it much but I definitely didn't hate it, I'm just a bit lost as to what exactly to do to improve my writing as I took so many extra steps to work on my paper and really put in a lot of effort to get almost the same grade, little discouraging honestly. But now that it's time to move on to wp3, something creative and fun, maybe this assignment will come easier. Many of or classmates were quite confused as to what is required for this assignment and that is fair considering how strange and unique it is. Recreating our chosen articles into other genres will be interesting, either fun or just way too complicated, but only time will tell on that one. We are to pick one of seven articles that were already pre chosen by our teacher and they really don't seem to be too interesting to me, thus it will be a challenge to recreate it for a younger audience since the main goal for them is likely to make it interesting. After reading through them all I hope to be one of the three people to get the short article as that is the only thing I care about at this point, with all of my classes it would be nice to have something short to read versus very long as I do have to condense it in to a more user friendly form. Our portfolios are also coming up so it'd probably be best to start doing revisions on my first piece, that way I save myself a head ache at the end of the quarter. It will be interesting to see how this class finishes out.

Painting Trees Questions

• What are some "moves" you see in these videos?
• Playful language
• Conversational style
• Type of brush specified
• Giving trees emotions
• Descriptive words
• Multiple examples
  Instructional portions
  Live demonstrations--can see them actually paint
  
  
• How do these artists (Bob Ross and the Disney painters) describe what they’re doing?  What do the artists refer to while they describe their work?  What do they talk about?  What do they direct our attention towards?
• Bob Ross:
• Give trees emotions to describe how they look
• Compare them to other objects we know
• Different tones of the colors
• Pointing out each piece and what it incorporates
• Directs our attention to how it looks and the needed details to get the desired effect
• Tell what to focus on and what not to
• Disney:
• Gives many examples
• Explains what they use to determine which to pick
• Talks about the movies the pictures are used in
• Describe what they are doing by describing what a tree means to them and using that as a source of their inspiration
• Attention to different styles but still the success of drawing the tree in the end of it all
• How would you characterize each artist's style, and what impact does their style have on you (a viewer/audience member)?  How have these artists chosen to portray their subject matter?  
• Bob Ross:
• simplistic, not exactly realistic, not animated or cartoon-ish
• Portray the subject matter by bringing us in to make the same painting, explaining each piece to get a very similar effect
• More of a teaching style than just demonstrating
• Disney:
• Very cartoonish, interesting, creative, very entertaining
• Different techniques such as the use of black and white to make depth
• Portray subject by having four artist paint the same tree, shows different styles within the same people who work to draw the same style for movies
• Only meant to demonstrate not to show the process or teach how to paint

Journals for week 7 online class

Q1. So, in the end, how’d your WP2 paper go?  What were you happy with?  What weren’t you?  Why?  Be specific!  (Remember: this is fodder for your end-of-quarter metacognitive reflection)

In the end I was happy with the paper i wrote, I felt that my cohesion was much better than usual as I used the new strategy of taking each sentence apart that Zack showed us. I did not like feeling as though I wasn’t able to answer all of the questions in the way that I wanted, having to form it around a thesis statement made addressing all parts very difficult.

Q2. Which 2 or 3 comments that you received yesterday were the most helpful for you?  Why?

To add more examples directly from my text as well as to completely redo one of my paragraphs helped me greatly. This outside look showed me that I need to be more careful that I say what I need to versus just thinking I really already said it. Also it calls attention to the point that we need to have lots of examples within our pieces as we need to make sure the reader  as well as ourselves understand what is being said fully. Next time I will be more careful to fully explain everything and explicitly outline all that I want to say, this way I avoid missing something that could have been important.

Thogg Week 6 (awkward this was saved as a draft and therefore posted late)

This week we started to work on WP2 and oh my goodness this task seems suite daunting. The sheer amount of writing that is wanted here seems like a ton let alone the fact that there are so many parts, and each part has so many different questions within it. Coming up with a thesis that allows for me to be able to address all of these pieces is going to be my second biggest challenge, but first I need to pick a topic and pick my sources. Some of my class mates have come up with some really interesting ideas such as a certain celebrity or some kind of disorder or injury, maybe this will lead me to be able to come up with one of my own. Something I think I could find a lot about seems to be eating disorders, maybe something more specific like anorexia. With that idea in mind it will be interesting to see what I come up with for a thesis statement. As I was so sick that I slept all of wednesday I was not there for class and did not get my outline looked at, hopefully this will not have taken away from my WP2. After our first class I really felt like I had a great concept of what moves are, they seem to be a specific choice an author has made to enhance their writing in a particular way. As said by number 7 on the journals moves can be confusing to define, so actually being able to call them out becomes very difficult at some points. This was something I definitely struggled with when writing my paper, yeah I see how or what the author is trying to do, but how do I exactly call it out to discuss it? This will be my biggest challenge in WP2.

Week 5 Thogg

This week in class we really started to dive in to writing project 2. To do this we had to begin to understand what a move is in terms of writing. So far what I’ve been able to gather is that a move is a choice an author makes in terms of style or word choice in order to get a certain effect on the reader or to get a certain point across. The more we keep diving in to this the more I’m actually starting to like the idea of WP2 versus any of our other writing so far. It is very interesting to me to not only look at what an author did, but why in the world they decided to do some of the techniques they do. By analyzing this I am gaining a deeper understanding of what goes in to a big piece of writing as well as learning what I can include in my own pieces. The use of italics is very interesting as it can serve to do more than just show a strange word but call attention to details as well. In our journals this week we focused on the comments that Zach left us and which ones we found to be the most helpful. His comment of breaking up paragraphs (mentioned by person 16) and avoiding the use of the word “things” (mentioned by person 15) has led me to try to apply that to my own writing although I was not given these corrections. It is for the benefit of the reader to break up large pieces of text so that it can be more easily read and by avoiding the word things there is more clarity within the writing. Both of these can significantly improve writing and as that is the purpose of this class I will strive to do those things as well. 

PB2B: Writing Strategies

When looking at pieces of literature, one can see that from author to author there are differences between the ways in which they have written. This can be anything from parenthesis or italics to the language used within the text. All of these different methods can be summarized as “moves”, meaning something a writer does within their pieces to get a certain effect on the reader. 

In the They Say, I Say Appendix, there are many moves the author employed for the benefit of the reader. One of these is the inclusion of bold centered titles, which I like to call “Front and Center”. By including these, the author made it much easier to see the different sections included in the book. He also made it much easier for someone to find a specific topic as the titles are brief but very concise. The author made their writing very navigable to all that want to utilize it. Next to this title the author makes another move, one that I’ve named “further directions” as the move is the inclusion of the page number next to the title in parenthesis. This move would be less significant if it happened to also be in bold, but rather the author made it in normal text, showing that the page number is not the most important thing he wants to show on this page. It is included however if the reader would like to look further into the template that they were shown if and only if they want to. While there are many types of bullet points that someone could use, this author strayed away from the traditional circular bullet points and opted for one that is a triangle instead. These triangles make the different subjects pieces stand out much more than a typical bullet point as it almost looks as though the bullet point is pointing at the line, drawing the attention of the reading and signifying that something new of importance is on this line. These eye catching and attention focusing bullet points are thus named “Look over there”. The next move I call “eXclude” because the author excludes the use of any word referring to a person by substituting the letter X in each place. This serves to let the writer have full creative control and not be swayed by what they author used in their template. The author wants to guide the writer, not make writing decisions for them. The last move I’d like to mention is the blank spaces left within each template that I’ve named “Your Turn”. These blanks serve to signal to the reader that this is where they are to add their own writing into the template, making this piece of writing very easy for the reader to utilize. This allows for them to be creative while at the same time guiding them to the writing they are intending to create. 

Another text that includes very noticeable moves is How to Read Like a Writer. instead of including a heading for each section of the essay, the author titles them all with centered, bold questions. The fact they are bold and in the center of the page makes them very noticeable to the reader. Forming the titles into questions allows the reader to better find the answer to a question they have about this topic, something unique and very effective that is not seen in most other pieces of writing. For this reason I’ve called it “What’s Your Question”. This author also uses italics on a single word or short phrases. This is done to emphasize a point to the reader or to draw attention to a specific detail the author finds important about the topic. This is a very effective way to point something out to a reader and is called “Pay Attention to Me”. Our author in this piece embeds many questions for the reader to ponder as they go through the piece. They are thus called “Follow Me” as they serve to guide the reader to the point the author is making. Finally within this piece I found the “Did You Catch That Yet?” as throughout the piece the author is constantly repeating the pain point of the essay. This serves to keep the reader focused on what the point of the piece of writing is. The technique, although at times annoying, is very successful in keeping the purpose known to the reader. 

The last notable move I’d like to discuss is within Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis. While titles are included to separate each topic, they are aligned with the rest of the text and do not have any distinguishing qualities. The author could have chosen to do this as to make the entire piece equally important or to make it all flow together versus being broken up into chunks. While effective in making one long piece of writing, this serves to make the paper feel like it goes on forever and is not pleasing in the slightest to read. Significant breaks within large pieces of writing are what makes it easier to read a bulk of text. 

PB2A

The publication I choose was an academic article about the effectiveness of reforestation, particularly on the east coast of New Zealand. This article was a research paper that explained the effect of people and therefore included the same structure as that of a typical research paper (abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion). This paper uses many scientific terms in order to better explain to those within the fields of this type of science what is going on while maintaining a concise paper. The explanation of what erosion is as well as the effects it as on the environment around it further aid the reader in their understanding of the experiment. The inclusion of specific percent differences are also throughout the paper as they serve to show the reader the differences between the inclusion and exclusion of the experimental technique at hand. If these were to be excluded the importance of what was done within the experiment would not be as easy to understand. Diagrams of the landscape to show the the of geography within the area of discussion and pictures of the location from year to year are also included for the understanding of the reader. By knowing how steep the hills are as well as what the physical changes of introducing more trees to the land scape looks like, anyone who reads this article can begin to form an image in their own minds as to how important it is that the scientists made this change to the landscape. This article also takes the benefits of the process and specifically calls attention to them. The effect of this on the reader is that they do not have to try to figure out why what was done was important, it is explicitly shown to the reader and eliminated the possibility for confusion of purpose.

Questions that were posed within this article were: “Which type of plant is most effective for soil retention?”, “What effect does reforestation have on erosion?”, and “What are the benefits of reforestation in terms of prevention of erosion?”. The idea of reforestation is operationalized by how the author explains its importance. The author makes a point to explain the type of environment that erosion occurs in, the changes in the environment that cause increased erosion, what can be done to stop erosion, the impact the experiment has had on the amount of soil that does not get washed away from the rain, the types of plants that most effectively as well as most quickly aid the reduction of erosion, and the benefits that have been injured from the reforestation of the hills in New Zealand. The most important aspects within this piece are the explanations of the processes and the inclusion of the benefits of the reforestation of New Zealand. The article contains a bulk of material which can make it difficult for someone completely understand all of what they are being told. It also gets tiring to a reader to continuously have to make their own connections as to what the importance of the included material is within this type of paper. It is for this reason that the two aspects were chosen to be the most important, the lead the reader to the highest amount of understanding as well as make it possible for anyone to be able to understand the article. With the inclusion of the benefits of the work that was done in New Zealand one can gain the idea that doing work with reforestation could be beneficial to other similar areas in the world. The inclusion of these aspects does not allow for the reader to get lost at all; they are guided to the importance of the information presented to them and its implications. 

Works Cited

Marden, Michael. "Effectiveness of Reforestation in Erosion Mitigation and Implications for Future Sediment Yields, East Coast Catchments, New Zealand: A Review." New Zealand Geographer 68.1 (2012): 24-35. ProQuest. 25 Apr. 2016 .

Thogg Week 4

This week in class we worked a lot more on our WP1s before submitting them on Monday. After many many hours and lots of revisions, additions, and a lot of thought I thought the paper I had written was at least in the slightest decent, but after seeing how our teacher felt about it I honestly just don't want to touch it again, good thing I'm forced to for our final projects. Ugh. I guess when looking at this paper again I will change it almost completely and focus on how the billboards are targeting a more specific audience, busy people who need quick food at a relatively non expensive price. I had thought about including where billboards are placed, why, and the audience they target by their placement and use of small bits of language, i.e. a person in a rush who doesn't have time to cook let alone read something that asks them to spend more of their hard earned money, but a classmate of mind discouraged the thought and said what I had done was good, maybe it was not the best idea to follow what someone else said as that is what I will now be changing my paper to. That is a much more interesting topic that I believe my teacher would like much more than the piece I did turn in. Oh well, as he said its a drop in the bucket and I can still get a good grade later. Now were starting to work on our WP2 and I'm not so sure what I want to write on for the PB2A. Something maybe along the lines of environmental science would be great as that is what I am most passionate about. My only problem is that so many studies fall into this subject i'm not sure what I would rather focus on. Our journals this class were meant to help us understand how writing makes someone sound and the assumptions made based off of what is written. Person number 18 and14 look as though they are science majors of some sort, but upon discussing with my classmates many were classified as this and were majors like communications. This I found very interesting as I was assumed to be a communications major and am environmental science, so the questions I picked didn't hint to who I really am. This weeks class was quite interesting and frustrating at times. It will be interesting to see how my other writing pieces go this quarter.

Week 3 Thogg

I apologize in advance for this thogg being a day late, this weekend I was in and out of the hospital due to horrible abdominal pains that follow after eating anything. This was a challenging situation in which I had to try my best to keep up with assignments, as the pain was so extreme that it was all I could do to lie in bed and try to sleep versus focus on the pain. Tests are still coming back to see what caused this to happen and why it continues to still happen. In class this week we really did our best to improve our first drafts of our WP1. As the prompt came to be a bit of a challenge to my fellow students, and myself all seemed to write to the best of our ability in order to complete the assignment in terms of analyzing the genres we picked, but it was not until we collaborated with each other that we were finally able to determine what we were able to argue about the genres. In mine I decided to pick the genre of fast food billboards, as did another classmate I saw in the journal entries. Both of us struggled to find something that we really wanted to argue about them but found them interesting in the sense that the conventions included are used to make people want the product. This problem was seen throughout all of the journal entries. Making an argument for something that also included analyzing all of the components of it turned out to be difficult, but once done the papers almost seemed to write themselves. This class is really making me think about how I write and overall has already greatly changed and or bettered my writing.

Week 2 Thogg

This week in writing was quite brief and therefore enjoyable, its not that I don't like this class its just that its so long I often feel a bit over the type of work we do by the end of the two hours. We went over our PB1A exercises as well as dug deeper in to what we started to learn as we wrote them. As a few of my class mates pointed out, in this assignment we were to be as specific as possible, which proved to be a challenge at first but once the topic was selected the writing assignment became much easier and started to flow naturally. Person number two was correct that writing with first order thinking made this assignment much easier and once the words started they did not stop. Many of us also encountered our inner struggles such as not liking what we write and then proceeding to delete it, only to write the same sentence down by the end of this repetitive process. As classmate nine pointed out, some genres were quite easy to pin point and write out while others upon further inspection were much more complex than we had first anticipated. This leads not only to defining one genre being complex but also leads to many overlapping and seeming as though they are the same as another with the exception of a few subtle details. I found the writing process that guy used in the video very interesting; while he wanted to give himself the ability to have enough creative time he also pushed himself to meet dead lines in order to keep himself on track and strike a balance between creative and timely. This is something that I hope to be able to incorporate into my writing as it seems to be the perfect balance of pressure and creativity. 

PB1B

The research paper generator has many conventions of what normally can be found in any more specific type of research paper. This generator seemed to be more generic and did not hone in on anything unique to a specific type of research paper. The structure of the paper is the same as many research papers in that it includes an abstract, introduction, related works, citations, multiple paragraphs per section, thoughts behind the research, labeled sections, diagrams that contain explanations, the way the idea was researched, the discussion of the results found within all of the different experiments discussed, and a conclusion to further summarize the findings of the research paper. All of the conventions within this genre are mean to convey all of the pieces of the research paper to a reader in such a way that they could recreate the experiment or experiments and have a full understanding of what was observed by the authors of the paper.   

The comic strip generator has dialogue boxes, characters, facial expressions of varying emotions such: as happiness, surprise,  anger, and awkwardness, conversation between characters, interactions between characters, tell a story, are intended to be humorous regardless of the execution of the joke, have an intended audience of the type of humor portrayed, have cartoon drawings, and varying colors that do not seem to have much importance to the comic as a whole.  All of these pieces are meant to entertain the audience and make the comic more visually appealing towards those who can encounter it.  

In the random meme generator the creators of these are drawing on the audiences familiarity of the image they have chosen as many people have already encountered them before. they also use creative word play to make a reference to something well known to an audience, use puns, attempt to be humorous or please the audience, relate to an interest of the mass majority of people, and draw on emotions such as irritation and annoyance. Memes also have bold fonts to draw the attention of the viewer and brief statements as to make the image more quickly read. The purpose of these conventions is to entertain the viewer with all combination of the image and a brief statement.  

The random generator i choose was a horror story generator. This genre had characters, adjectives that were meant to describe something frightening such as the word zombified, random details to create the story such as a setting, included an accident, body parts, deadly weapon such as a gun or knife, and had background stories that gave the characters more meaning and depth than just random strangers. The horror story also included a plot, the feeling of danger, a curse, and the ability for a solution to the problems to be solved by the characters. All of these pieces were key to creating a story that was meant to be scary by the use of common ideas of what can scare people. These conventions all play a part in entertaining the reader as well as keeping their attention.  

These websites set out a familiar framework of each type of genre, which allows of the person viewing each of these to being to see the conventions within them. By making a template that people can put random words or phrases into, these websites are giving the viewer a basic understanding as to what each type of genre requires for it to be categorized as that genre. When one considers what they are writing in the blanks as well as the way the words chosen are used in the generator a deeper understanding of what is required to make the genre is gained. The viewer also gains insight as to the purpose of each type of genre as they play with the random generators. 

PB1A: Biological Research Paper

A biological research paper has many components that make it stand out from other types of research papers. This can first be noticed when considering its rhetorical features. Every biology research paper is comprised of various parts including an abstract, introduction, methods, results, the discussion of the results, and a conclusion. The abstract serves to summarize the important pieces of the paper and is meant to be written at the end, but placed at the beginning of the paper to inform readers about the key pieces of the paper and inform them as to whether or not it is relevant to what they are searching for. This piece is followed by a basic introduction containing information relevant to understand the study as well as the hypothesis being tested. The next component is the methods and materials section, the purpose of which to allow the reader to recreate the experiment. This contains very specific explanation of each step as well as the required materials. Following this is the result section which just lists out the data with or without graphs and very brief explanations of the data. Discussing the data is done within the discussion, which is meant to explain what the data shows as well as whether or not the hypothesis tested was supported or refuted by the results. The conclusion section of a biological research paper is meant to summarize briefly the results and their implications in relation to the hypothesis. All of these papers have a target audience of other scientific researchers, a tone of sophistication, and have the purpose of telling other researchers what they were able to find with their experimentation. The context of all that is written within a biological research paper is all related to the hypothesis the scientist is testing. The conventions of biological research paper include concise language, scientific terminology, very specific thesis, multiple pages long, explanations of experiment and data, graphs or some type of visual representation of the information, citations for facts, connections to other research, potential use of results, and summary of the paper as a whole. It is the pieces of a biological research paper and their uses towards their audience that make this a research paper. The author is trying to find an answer to a question that could help others answer their own relatively related questions. It is the set up and purpose of a biological research paper that makes it different from other types of research papers. Few others is any include a brief but informative summary of the entire paper at the very beginning to aid those who are also doing research. Papers of this type are attempting to answer pieces of a larger question that often many people are collaborating on, further making the format of it necessary and different from other research papers. They build on the research of others, which requires many citations to give the paper more legitimacy and standing in the world of biology research. These things are not found as often in other types of research papers and differentiates them from this genre. 

Week 1 Thlogg

In class right now we are learning the conventions of genres. As a class it seems that few students understood what it truly meant to break down the conventions of a genre, leading to all of us learning just how specific on can get when they look within something that is classified as a genre. As Zach said, its like the Russian dolls we see as a kid, more specific genres fit within larger more general genres, but it is the very specific genres, aka the tiny Russian dolls, that we are trying to hone in on and learn to write about. This gets very difficult to do, especially when we are asked well what does that really mean what are you getting at in reference to something we tried to sum up generically. This week we have been pushed more and more to become specific with the things we are calling conventions within genres. It isn’t enough to say weapons, but rather we need to say a specific type of weapon. As seen in response 1 of our in class work, it wasn't enough to say drama was a convention, something more specific like interpersonal conflict was what was wanted instead. We also learned about two different kinds of thinking and when they are to be used or rather when we unconsciously use them. the first is called first order thinking, which in my own words is more of a stream of consciousness that doesn't always have a structure. This is commonly used when speaking with fiends and writing rough drafts. The second kind of thinking we use is called secondary thinking. This is used in a formal setting when trying to use precise language. This type of thinking is known to be used with critical thinking such as with editing essays and always has a formal structure.

About Me

My name is Kayla Smith and I'm a sophomore at UCSB. I'm a full time environmental science major, work for Starbucks 20-30 hours a week, and do an internship with an organization called Your Children's Trees. At this internship we plant trees every Saturday morning on UCSB's Coal Oil Point reserve and go to science nights at local elementary schools to teach children about trees. The environment is my passion and I plan to have a career in which I impact international environmental policy with the United Nations Environmental Program. This love for the environment can be seen in many aspects of my life, more recently my trip to Ecuador where I did reforestation in Bahia de Caraquez and San Clemente over spring break. I'm always trying to find more reasons to be outside, and therefore have grown to love hobbies such as hiking, surfing, swimming, and long distance running as well as doing oil paintings of the environment, more specifically sunsets. I find nature to be the most beautiful and love to depict it in my art. In my life my main goal is to help the environment recover and set up methods that will continue to improve its health and protect it long after I am gone. I am also a very family oriented person and make sure that no matter what is going in my work or school life that I am there if needed. Family, work, school, and my passion for the environment are key components to who I am.