InAe Lee
WRT 205
The first assignment in WRT 205, which was writing the Huffington Post Blog Article, was the assignment that gave me some confidence in writing. I think there was some luck for me that my major is public health and the topic was about the food safety. In my other public health classes, the major topic during this time was food safety and nutrition, so the first assignment drew my attention. However, I have never written a blog or an article, so I had to look at some blog articles and compare what differences they have with essays for classes. I personally was not a fan or writing a research paper since high school, because it requires lots of time and resources. Especially, researching on a topic that I do not have any interest on was a painful experience. However, just having a fun and personally important topic to research about was a great start for me. Also, the workshop for writing a strong ‘lead’ helped me writing a strong claim for the article. “Would you still be able to buy the product, if the company includes the image of cows being fed with parts of downer cows and thousands of chickens packed over their manures on their advertisement?” The most challenging part of researching was to find the right sources that will help me in giving information and evidence. By inviting the guest speaker, it was great to know other databases other than Google to find the sources. I found LexisNexis and Scopus pretty helpful, in terms of how organized their websites were and easier to find the sources with decent information.
Practicing how to do a good research and write a good research paper would not much affect on my career, but in terms of remaining school year and other courses, I think it would be a great skill to use. We did many workshops as a class over the semester and the most helpful workshop for me was how to write a good ‘lead’ and Evaluating Sources. As I said before, in researching, finding the appropriate sources was the most challenging part. After talking doing the Evaluating Sources workshop in class, I learned how to choose helpful sources by finding the writer’s project, Kairos, Logos, Ethos and Pathos. Just looking for those could give me if the source has enough evidence for me to use or not. Using this skill will help me a lot in the future writing and also save me up some time.
Researching on Food Politics and Political Controversies has increased my interest and understanding. Food Politic was a pretty familiar topic due to other class. However, I only watched the clip ‘Food, Inc.’ in other class but not researching and get deeper information about Food Politics. Because food is the most important requirement to stay healthy and happy, when I realized there are some dark secrets in the food industries, I was not happy. I know that my argument will not do much change to our food system, but just researching and writing about the truth made me feel like I did something. On the other hand, political controversies started out as a pretty boring topic for me, because I do not know much about politic. However, the topic I chose matter much to me since it is pretty serious in South Korea and I actually wanted to know more about North Korea by researching. This topic also made me engage a lot but more seriously than the Food Politics.
If I continue one of the topics, I would continue with the North Korea, because it is on going and most relatable topic for me. Whether they are threat or not, whether or not we are divided or united, North Korea would be the biggest concern in South Korea. Also, while I was researching I learned more information that I did not hear or read from the news.
I would like to share the UNIT II with someone outside the class, because the five minutes TED Talk is a great way to share information in a short time with key arguments. Since, I chose the topic, North Korea to hope that people in US could also learn some information about them that they did not know and possibly have some more attention, telling someone about my neighboring country will mean something to me.