Sunday of Week 6: SMC Planning

Part 1: Building Blocks to Build Expertise

Over the past 6 weeks, we have worked on many assignments to work on building blocks to help us write our first draft of our scicomm article. The few assignments that I found most helpful were:

Reviewing a Scicomm Article for Story Elements -- learning how to dissect a scicomm article was integral to learning how to write one. If I had not picked apart each aspect of the articles, I would have had a lot more difficult time writing my own. Instead, I went into writing my draft with goals for each expectation and I had a better idea of how to mix scientific information with storytelling techniques.

The Pitch -- this served as a sort of outline for me when I was writing my essay. I find it super helpful to have a guidline that I create instead of having one handed to me. When I create it, I feel that I have an easier time generating ideas and creating a flow of information. It makes my writing way more efficient to have clear, attainable goals.

The Annotated Biblographies assignment -- this assignment was super helpful for gathering key information that I would use in my essay. Having the clear information made it easier to add writing components to convey the information I gathered

Part 2: Meeting Minimum Requirements on LR Draft

Overally, I am generally confident that my essay meets the miniumum requirements. Right away, my essay presents the dog as the animal that the essay is in focus of. I reminded readers of how we conventially percieve dogs, and then present them with a persuasion to shift our perception on them in my thesis statement: "Research in the field of dog cognition opens up a new world of perspective not just from dogs, but from all animals – as humans, stepping out of the world of perception that we are comfortable can result in great steps in the areas of technology and accessibility in the future." This also addresses the main idea of the study of dog cognition, which is the focus of the essay, and how laerning more about it can improve our society in various ways.

My body paragraphs meet the requirements by summarizing and pulling information from three different studies about dog cognition. I would like to strengthen the organization of my essay by finding key themes in each study, rather than talking about one after the other. I only have two other sources, the TED talk and the Smithsonian article, so I would need to find another source that can strenghten my work. Although I have made some strides to increase my scholarly ethos, I could definitely incorportate more into my writing, or perhaps provide more definitions to the readers from the research articles. I would like to use more quotations, but I struggled trying to find any direct quotes from the researchers. This would be a good area to find another source for. I feel that I have a pretty thorough works cited, and a solid application of language and grammar. Within the next few weeks I know that I can narrow down on some of my weaker skills to hopefully bring my entire essay to a level that I am confident and proud of.

3. Social Media Campaign Planning

For my SMC, I would like to highlight the issue of Dogs of the Homeless. I think this topic can be both very controversial and very interesting. Most can agree that we generally want dogs to be loved and cared for, and not abused to subjected to uncessary issues. Upon my research, I familiarized myself with petsofthehomeless.org, specifically the organization in Los Angeles. This organization provides food and verterinary care to animals whose owners include low-income seniors and people disabled with life threatening illnesses.