Writ 2

What I gathered from my classmates is that I need to clean up my organization by adding headers, use more examples, include a better conclusive paragraph, and focus on more of the unique aspects of my major and what they do for it. These tips sound helpful and I'll most likely end up making those changes. My strengths are my introduction and discussion of the interdisciplinary nature of environmental studies. My weaknesses are that I need to focus more on what makes these conventions unique and why they are important to my major, but chosing which ones are is difficult.

Hedges: "there is potential" "has the advantage" "our estimates are conservative" may, might, can, could "there are uncertainties" "may result" "may be likely" "to our knowledge" "is probably" "more data are needed" "further research" "it appears" These phrases are used to suggest that something is likely, but may not be absolutely true, so that the author(s) are not claiming something false with complete certainty. If the author(s) are not totally confident about something, they will use these words to leave open a chance for rebuttal, to be challenged and possibly proven wrong. This makes it so they are not accountable for whether the opposite is true because they never said it wasn't, but that it "may" be. This also makes the writing more professional and credible, as they are open to refuting arguments. self-mentions: "we analyzed" ...

A healthier US diet could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from both the food and health care systems - Quentin Gee and his co-authors are speaking to other scientists in the environmental, climatic, and nutrition disciplines, as well as government officials, students, and the general public.  -I say: "We found..." "We report research that..." "We show for the first time..." "Our results provide..." They say: "There is increasing scientific consensus that..." "The climate impact... has been calculated..." - The author has contributed by conducting a study that has never been done before to anyone's knowledge, and by doing so has promoted a new dialogue about the relationship between two variables most might have never suspected were correlated. - The primary research question posed is whether or not there is any correlation between the diets of humans and global warming - particularly if healthier d...

The first article was written by Quentin Gee, an environmental studies/philosophy professor here at UCSB who has taught a few of the classes I've taken. "A healthier diet could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from both the food and healthcare systems," is a study that looks at the effects adopting healthier diets have on risk of disease, healthcare costs, and GHG emissions. Only conducted on the US population, it suggests that healthier diets reduced risks of diseases like coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes, health costs by an average of $85 billion per year, and emissions by 222-826 kg of CO2 per capita per year. Gee argues that diet change will have a significant contribution to public health and GHG reduction, and wrote this article in order to advocate a dialogue in politics concerning these potential benefits. The results of this study have important implications as to how we can combat climate change as well as obesity or food-related disease. If everyone at...

WP2 was a little easier than WP1 in my experience. There is a lot of information available to the public regarding wildfires and other natural disasters, so it wasn't hard at all to find relevant information. It was easier to write because the format characteristic of online environmental news articles is very short, concise, and straight to the point. I didn't need to add any "fluff" or unnecessary language in order to sound like I new what I was talking about, so putting everything on to paper was simple. It's also easier to write about something that is interesting to you or pertains to your field of study since you already have some knowledge or are somewhat passionate about it. It was also easier than I thought to meet the word count requirement due to the abundance of information and sources. What I thought made WP2 a little difficult was that I was told I needed to emphasize "research" over general information after my first draft was read. But ...

 My genre is online environmental news articles. My primary audience will be the community of the Central Coast and L.A. County regions. Secondary audiences might include people who live near forests or care about their wellbeing. The topic of my article will be the fires that spread through those two regions as well as the following mudslide in Montecito. It will argue for people to be more aware and cautious when interacting with the forest, since not doing so can have extremely dangerous repercussions (the fire was caused by an illegal cooking fire). This argument is important to the reader because both the fires and the mudslide had a direct negative impact on the people of California, especially in those regions (loss of plant/animal life, smoke pollution, property destruction, death, etc.). I will, of course, appeal to the reader's reasoning (natural disasters affect everyone), emotions (loss of life, destruction), and morals (the forest should be protected for its own sake a...