DD8HW9 Project 2

Project 2: Using Visuals in Nutrition Education Column and Annotated Bibliography


Rhetorical Situation:
The purpose of this document was to remind nutrition educators of their ethical responsibilities when working with visuals. The target audience for this ethics column is Health University's Campus Health Service.  This department trains health educators to provide nutritional counseling and education to members of campus and the community. This column will be provided to new and current employees, and published in the company's weekly newsletter; therefore, it will include links to various websites and images. This will allow employees to access additional information as needed.

Project:

• What are you most proud of in the entire project? Why?
• I am proud of the final document because I learned a lot while writing it. I was familiar with some nutrition and public health ethical and cultural considerations, but had never written about them. I learned a lot about paramedic editing and varying sentence style and am proud of the changes I made to this document. 
• What do you wish you had time to further expand, include, or revise in the project?
• I would like to learn more about the paramedic method. I use a lot of prepositions and although I made a lot of changes to my column, there are still areas that could be revised if given more time. 
• When and where did you get stuck while working on the project? How did you overcome your problem?
• I had a hard time narrowing down visuals and ethical issues when I first started the process. Public Health is a very broad field including mental health, physical health, socioeconomic status, and health disparities, as well as educational aspects, health promotion, health prevention and data collection. Even after I decided on nutrition, I still had to narrow down my focus to nutrition education. I overcame this issue by conducting a lot of research. I reviewed many peer-reviewed articles and used a few different databases. 

Learning:

• What technologies did you use to complete this project? Why were they appropriate? What processes did you take to learn the technology application/s? What did you learn? What more you hope to learn in the future? How/why might you use the technology application/s again?
• I used a variety of technologies to complete this project. I used my laptop at home and my desktop at work to complete my research. I used the Arizona Health Science Library website to choose Google Scholar, PubMed, and OvidSP databases. I used links provided  on D2L as well to research Technical Communication Journals. Lastly, I used Google and various nutrition websites. I was reminded of the various visuals that are often used in the nutrition field, such as photographs and illustrations, and MyPlate and MyPyramid.  I learned about the importance of adapting visuals to your audience, but maintaining ethical standards in the process. For example, using simple illustrations for people with low literacy skills. I will continue to conduct research and use visuals in health education, especially when designing educational materials for different populations. I will also pay more attention to and consider cultural considerations in my current profession at Campus Health. 

• Discuss at least three of the course outcomes you feel you worked towards with this assignment. Provide evidence of your learning by pointing to specific aspects of the project.
• 1. Critique and use flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing using a variety of technologies.
• This project focused a lot on proofreading, editing, peer-reviewing and grammar. Using the style checklist, proofreading checklist and usability checklist on my peers' docuemnts, aided me in the drafting and editing process of my own.
• 2. Develop intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others to participate in the collaborative and social aspects of technical writing processes, including giving and responding to productive feedback and working in teams.
• We were not required to work in teams for this project, but I felt like this peer review process was more collaborative. I chatted with another student while peer reviewing and felt like the comments I received on my document were more detailed and helpful. I reviewed all of the comments and made necessary changes to my column and bibliography, based on some of the feedback.
• 3. Explain why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, tone, and mechanics vary and extrapolate common formats and/or design features for different kinds of technical texts.
• I learned a lot about technical writing this week while working on this project. Writing an ethics newsletter was a different style of writing for me, and I enjoyed learning about different ways to improve my writing style, especially when completing the Paramedic Editing exercise.

• Discuss at least one personal course goal you feel you worked towards with this assignment. Provide evidence of your learning by pointing to specific aspects of the project. 
• Personal Goal: To gain a better understanding of what Technical Writing and Technical Communication are and how to properly apply them.
• I feel like I am starting to understand more aspects of technical communication. I conducting research using various databases, incorporated themes of ethics and visualizations into a field of my interest and put it all together into a column for a newsletter. I used various forms of technical communication and applied them to produce one document.

• What did you learn about yourself as a technical writer?
• As mentioned in my description of my personal goal, I learned a lot about technical communication and writing this week. I realized there is a lot more thought that goes into technical writing, but that the more I practice these writing style techniques and exercises, the more likely I will begin to incorporate them into my writing on a regular basis.