Final Exam: Vaccines

The anti-vaccination debate analysis

Field Map

The rhetoric of sports communication

Analysis of Visual Rhetoric

This image was on the website, Social Times, which has articles about games, apps, social media and other advertising and marketing topics. The purpose of the graphic was for informational and functional purposes. Since the two teams playing in this NBA playoffs were both in the southern part of the United States, it was obvious that the most tweets would be coming from people in nearby states. Since the two infographics are very similar, it would have been helpful if the article gave more of a description discussing the differences in the maps. Also the title of the article was "26.7 Million Tweets Sent During NBA Finals, 150,000 Tweets Per Minute Game 7 Peak" which could not be gathered from these tweet maps. The legend for the maps stated that the different colors represented the number of tweets per million population, so if the audience is not familiar with the population of each states, then it would be impossible to infer how many tweets actually were coming from those states. Since there was no caption for the two maps and they looked relatively similar, this was an ineffective way to compare tweets about the two teams unless the purpose was to show that there was no significant difference between the numbers of tweets about each team.

Writing Analysis Paragraph

 Formal writing can vary depending on the topic on hand. In general formal writing is a more difficult read, using longer sentences, and precise but sometimes unknown terms. The article written in the Journal of Sports Economics, “Political Correctness, Selection Bias, and the NCAA Basketball Tournament”, Paul & Wilson, 2015, uses less scientific terms and formulas and more theoretical terms and program based language. This language is used since the audience for this journal is more likely to be those interested in either the economics, sociology or theoretical calculations behind sports rather than experimental scientists. The average words per sentence was 24, which is considered to be a complex sentence, and the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease was 37.4. This means the article is meant to be read by at least university students. Jargon terms such as “running up the score” (203) are put in quotation marks, and are the main reasoning behind the long sentences as they use subordinate clauses to include definitions and/or explanations of these terms. Although this article was found using a scientific article database, the format of the article is not in the typical IMRAD format, at least for headings. The article does include several of the sections of IMRAD including an introduction and statistical methods section, but they are not split up by paragraphs or headings, and the only headings are Abstract, Economic Rationale Behind Tournament Selection, Regression Results, and Conclusion. Another notable observation is the use of “We” and the repetition of “we believe”, “we wish” and “we consider.” The first person writing style in combination with the statistical methods effectively relates back to the idea of human and computer error and biases in the topic of selecting teams for the NCAA basketball tournament.

Children's Book: Track and Field Encyclopedia for Children

Children's Book on ISSUU

Technical Review: Fake Bake Flawless Self-Tanning Liquid

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Medium version 

Pop vs. Pro: The science behind the “munchies”

Two people tell a story about the same event to two different people. One is telling their friend this story, and another is telling the story to an interviewer. Although they are talking about the same event, each person is going to have their own spin on the story, and depending on who they are talking about, details might be explained differently or even left out. When telling my friend about my college experience I most likely am going to be a lot more explicit with my word choice, use some slang or inside jokes, and tell stories that I think my friend would think are interesting or funny. When telling an interviewer about my college experience I might focus more on what I learned, who I met, and how I have changed and leave out details about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I am still talking about one topic, my college experience, and yet these two stories are going to be much different. The same goes for scientific topics. Depending on who the author is, who the audience is, and what the context is, the story is going to be portrayed differently.

Nature is an international weekly journal of science and one of the most notable and distinguished journals. According to their website mission statement, one of the goals of the journal is “to rapidly disseminate results of science to the public throughout the world in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life”. The website is categorized into Chemistry, Life Sciences, Clinical Practice, Earth & Environment and Physical Sciences. Since all of these articles are peer reviewed, many of the readers of this journal are other scientists, doctors and professors who may even be published themselves. Like in my experience, students read these articles too, but mainly from the science and tech fields of study, and many of my science classes have assigned case studies that come from this journal because of its reliability in the science world.

The article uses an exorbitant amount of acronyms although mentioned briefly at the beginning, became confusing when every other word was an acronym. The article also requires the reader to be highly involved as it references many figures and tables and has about nine pages of extended data tables and graphs. If the reader is unfamiliar with reading these types of graphs then they would have a hard time understanding much of the article. I thought that the article was very distracting because the figure captions were extremely long, although necessary to include the appropriate data. The article was full of scientific jargon and probably unreadable for most lay people. Even the title, including the word “cannabinoid-induced feeling” probably would not turn a light on in the most pot smoking familiar person until the last paragraph of the discussion mentions that “the phenomenon of cannabis-triggered feeding in a state of satiety is a hallmark of marijuana use in humans” (Koch 4).

In contrast, The Guardian is a British national daily newspaper that now also has US and Australia editions. It is one of the top read newspapers in the world. The audience of this newspaper is people of all ages and levels of education. A majority of the people reading this article were probably intrigued by the title of this article since a “recreational activity” such as smoking pot was in a research science article.

The article uses the slang word “munchies’ to describe the increased appetite while under the influence of marijuana. The article is much more readable, clear, and relatable, using terms known by younger populations. This article only uses acronyms three times and the scientific word is in parenthesis directly after the acronym.  This article “dumbs down” the science behind the mechanism in the brain that is responsible for appetite and cravings. The article still falls under the science section and uses terms such as “neurons” and “organelles” which are basic science vocabulary that is learned in middle school. The article also uses specific imagery such as a “desire for a packet of Doritos or a bowl of Coco Pops” to relate to the audience’s behaviors (Devlin).

Although smoking marijuana is a relatively well-known practice, most people do not know the specific science behind the physical changes it causes. They might be able to describe behaviors and thoughts that arise as a result of smoking or ingesting marijuana, but probably rely more on basic news articles like The Guardian’s rather than scientific research articles from journals such as Nature. I would also relate the difference in the writing and readability of these two different types of articles to the full ingredient list on the back of a package versus the ingredients promoted on the front. On the front are familiar words and ingredients such as “high fiber” and “protein”, while the back might contain unpronounceable sources for those nutrients, but each is technically describing the same thing, the front simply chooses more eye catching words and phrases, than the back, which is more comprehensive.

Works Cited

Devlin, Hannah. "Reefer research: cannabis 'munchies' explained by new study ." The Guardian

[New York, NY]. Guardian News and Media Limited, 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

Koch, Marco, et al. "Hypothalamic POMC neurons promote cannabinoid-induced feeding."

Nature (2015): Web. 25 Feb. 2015.