A Week of Planning

This week in Writing 39C, we had to prepare for our group advocacy project. The advocacy topic my group decided was animal experimentation. We plan to use social media (Facebook, Twitter, and a website) to raise awareness about the cruelness of animal experimentation and to promote the use of cruelty free products. Although our campaign is specifically targeted at UCI students, we are also advocating to the general population. Last Wednesday, we were given the entire class time to prepare/work on the advocacy project. As a group, we decided that each of us will manage a social media site and link our pages on the other two social media platforms for people to refer to. I was assigned to manage our Twitter page. To do this, I made a Twitter account that is accessible to the rest of the group. On the page, I included a picture of the three of us and wrote a short biography so that our audience/reader know who we are and what we are doing. We also created a unique catchy hashtag (#SAFE - Safe Animals From Experiments), which people can use to spread our campaign.

Also early in the week, we were assigned a partner and we had to peer edit each other's HCP paper. To summarize, my peer editor suggested that I needed to make my project more "historical", meaning that I need to use studies to show how the research on cellular regeneration of lobsters progressed over time. I took his advice and looked for the first research that found neuron growth in crustaceans. I found the initial research and implemented the source into my final HCP draft so that my paper is more of a historical review rather than a paper describing the structure of a lobster's olfactory organ. My peer editor also suggested that I need to remove/reword the scientific terms since they were confusing and made the paper difficult to understand. I chose to ignore this comment mainly because the HCP was targeted at a scholarly audience and it is implied that the reader would have a some what strong biological background. Furthermore, scientific terms will also increase the ethos of my paper, making my literature review more credible.

Following my peer editor's and Dr. Haas' advice on my first draft, I made major changes to my paper. My top priorities in revising my first draft were to make my paper more of a historical review, and improve upon my introduction and conclusion. To do this, I found two additional sources that I used for my historical review: a study that inspired many research experiments investigating the neural growth in crustaceans, and a study that built upon the first study. I implemented the two sources and added transition sentences to show how the studies are connected to make my paper more of a historical review. I also took Dr. Haas' advice to add lobster facts to my introduction. Using the source she recommended, I explained how all species of lobsters share similar physiological structures and the molt cycles that lobsters undergoes. I definitely think this revision made my paper more like a historical review rather than a paper explaining the structure of a lobster's olfactory organ. I think it explains how research on a lobster's ability to regenerate olfactory tissues over time progressed from an initial research. Even though I attempted to improve upon my conclusion, I feel like my conclusion is still weak and I did not fully explain how my HCP will relate to my advocacy project.