Persuasive Letter Blog post #7

Dear Hospital Food Officials,
  I represent The Committee for Healthier Patients, a committee founded by the great Dr. Foodis Goot.  Dr. Goot has a Ph.D in health food and the culinary arts.  I am writing you this letter to implore you to not only change, but enforce the standards of hospital food.  The food served to patients, visitors and staff should be improved.  In a survey conducted over the past five years, 59 million of 60 million patients admitted to hospitals nationwide said that the food they were sever during their stay was awful! When asked to describe the food, the most popular replies were "over cooked", "soggy", "tasteless", and "slop".  Some older patients even compared the "food" they were served to war rations and government commodities given out during the Depression!  
No one goes into an emergency room thinking about the food they are going to be served.  Most people are too much in pain or otherwise ill to think about food. Most people do not even want to get admitted1 They just want to be medicated, patched up, and sent home.  But my committee is concerned about the patients that do  have to stay.  
According to the law your establishments have to provide food for your patients.  But some patients actually get sicker or even DIE because of the slop you see fit to serve them! There may be vegetables, fruit, and meat on the "patient trays" but how are they prepared? The meat (mostly chicken of some kind) is usually deep fried.  The vegetables are boiled until they're slimy and unfit to eat.  The fruit comes in a cup floating in heavy syrup or wiggling around in tasteless jell-o.  
The human tongue was made to taste! That is why we have TASTE buds!  We understand that taste is not a big concern of yours (obviously!) but we firmly believe that food that tastes good plays a part in patient recovery.  Think about it, if you are sick what is the first thing you reach for after medication? Food! Most of the time chicken noodle soup is the cure for everything!  The great philosopher Hippocrates once said that "Food is Medicine".  The medical field is based on his teachings, and he said this so why do you refuse to listen? 
Please make the changes necessary for improving patients’ and hospital stays.  We fear if you continue to neglect your responsibilities as food officials, the country’s population will eventually diminish to zero because no one gets well and every one stays sick.  Please, the fate of the nation depends on you!

Sincerely,

The Committee for Healthier Patients

Review on Rhetorical Appeals Blog Post #6

        There are three categories of rhetorical appeal strategies: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. 

Ethos refers to a writer or source's credibility or authority in his field or on the topic being talked about. For instance, Joe is the CEO of Big Music Production and Recording and also has degrees in Music Business and Recording Technology.  If Joe says that the company’s current recording methods are inefficient and too costly, the audience has reason to believe him based on his credibility and authority in his business field.  

Logos appeals to a reader or an audience’s sense of logic and reasoning.  If a writer were to say that music is sound; therefore a bird squawking is music, this would be an example of the use of logos.  Granted, it’s a very ineffective one in my opinion, but an example nonetheless.  

Now on to the third rhetorical strategy:  Pathos.  Pathos appeals to a reader’s emotions.  When an author write something that makes the reader feel an emotion, especially sympathy, he is putting pathos to work.  Politicians and public speakers use pathos often in their speeches to convince the public that they need to participate in something or be on the speaker’s “side” about a certain issue.  They appeal to the public’s sense of camaraderie when they use phrases such as “My fellow Americans. . . ”.  In saying these things, the speakers make the public feel closer together.  They tap into the natural instinct of people to band together. 

Now that you know what each of these strategies mean, take a look at this example of a commercial to sell VHS players that encompasses all three strategies:

Hello America! Vanessa Watch CEO and manager of Vanessa’s Video Emporium here! Do you have old VHS tapes laying around your house just begging to be watched, but have nothing to watch them with?  Did your old VHS player wear out and never got replaced? Did you get rid of it thinking you’d never watch tapes again because of these new DVD things? Or maybe you’re just just looking for a VHS player because you’re totally rad and into “vintage” stuff?  Does it feel like something is missing in your life without the VHS player? Well, if you answered yes to any of these questions, come on down to Vanessa’s Video Emporium and make your life whole again by fulfilling all of your VHS player and tape needs! But if you answered no, lease, people come anyways! Times are tough! Money is tight and this is all I know how to do! There’s no other job out there selling what I do because I am the last in the world! Please, America.. Have a heart!

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Review of Annotated Bibliography

        An annotated bibliography is a tool used by writers to help them keep their source information organized.  An annotated bibliography lists the citations of a writer's sources in MLA format and in alphabetical order.  The citations are then followed by a short paragraph, or précis, that typically contains the author's name, the genre of the book or article, the author's thesis, an explanation of that thesis, and the author's purpose followed by an "in order to" phrase. The paragraph should not show favoritism or bias in any way.  The writer should not point out what he sees as flaws in the source author's argument in the précis. The paragraph also should not exceed 200 words.  

An annotated bibliography also helps the writer to better understand what he is writing about.  Making an annotated bibliography forces a student writer to thoroughly read (or at least skim) his source content by requiring a short description of what the author of the source is trying to accomplish in his article.  By doing so, the writer can get all of the correct information to write an affective and informative précis.  Yes, some lengthy articles may be a pain and time consuming to read, but by reading them you as a writer can create a more affective annotated bibliography.  A summery of all of your source material will be extra accessible and in-text citations will come easier because you can find the source the information came from quicker and more easily just by looking at the annotated bibliography.  

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Paper Topic Ideas

        The paper topic I have chosen to write about is the question of hospital food being truly healthy enough for patients. Could it be improved? Is there any real nutritional value to the foods they serve the patients or is it just something on a tray so the people over the food services can say they are complying with the law and giving food to the sick people in their care? 
        The inspiration for this topic came from my hospital stay a couple weeks ago.  The hospital admitted me overnight, and while I was there they brought me dinner and breakfast the next morning.  My dinner consisted of a piece of extremely greasy, bland and nearly meatless chicken, what seemed to be soggy over steamed mixed vegetables, a big, sweet yeast roll, sweet tea and a styrofoam bowl of extra sweet pineapple upside down cake.  Breakfast was powdered eggs, what looked to be limp microwave bacon, and the only health conscious food of the past two days a bowl of regular cheerios.  My first thought upon seeing both of these trays was “None of this can be healthy.” Granted, my second thought was to stuff my face anyways because I had not ate a real meal in almost a week and the antibiotics I was being pumped full of gave me the appetite of a teenage boy, but that’s besides the point.  

With this theme, I hope to effectively argue through researched evidence that hospitals could serve healthier and more nutritious meals to their patients.  The people there are, after all, sick!  I plan to convince my reader that there are actions that could be taken by the people in charge of the food service in hospital wards to improve the options for the patients.  There are special “trays” for special diets at most hospitals, and one could argue that this is a step in the direction of healthier food options for those who are admitted and their “caretakers”, but how healthy are those “special trays” in reality?  In my paper, I plan to find valuable research to answer this question and develop it into something that could possibly make an impact some where.  

Skills to be Learned post (Part 1)

As I was reading over the “Skills to be Learned” list, I realized that there were a few things I kind of already knew how to do fairly well such as summarizing and quoting sources.  After looking over the whole list, I also realized there were quite a few things that I either had no idea what they were or just did not fully understand.  One of these topics was paraphrasing. I have a little understanding of what paraphrasing is, but not only is it difficult for me to decide when and how to paraphrase it is also challenging for me to distinguish the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing.  I think the main difference is that summarizing is in the writer’s own words whee paraphrasing is rewriting the author’s words. I’m not really sure. 

Another problem I ran into is I am not completely sure I fully understand the function of an annotated bibliography.  I understand that it is basically a citation of your source with a short summary of the material that came from that source, but I’m not exactly sure why it is necessary. What is it’s purpose? Does it really have a purpose?  

Thirdly, there was the big issue of not being confidently able to evaluate and use the research information I find.  I can locate it just fine, it’s the deciding what is the most important and relevant part that I have trouble with.  So many things seem important!  Even if I know certain bits of information are not as important as others and they could probably be left out, I still feel as if they need to be included.  

As I continued reading, I realized that I have no idea what APA formatting is.  I have heard of it.  I know it it’s a format for citing sources that is used by engineers and possibly educators, but if I had to cite a source in APA format, I could not do it.  In short, I honestly hope I am able to learn how to use this format some time this semester because the field of work I plan on going into (recording technology) is considered a type of engineering.  As I stated before, APA is the format of citing used by engineers in their research papers.  

I also hope to understand what a block quote is.  I would also lille to learn how and when to use a block quote.  

TED talks discussion

We as humans tend to think of ourselves as superior inhabitants of our planet,  but what if we are all just a part of the plants' plan for world domination?  In the TED talks video "A Plant's-Eye View" author Michael Pollan raises a very similar question.  In this video Mr. Pollan tells the viewer and his audience about an epiphany that came to him after observing a bumblebee pollinating an apple tree one afternoon near his garden.  This epiphany was while he and the bumblebee both probably thought they were "calling the shots" as to which plants got to reproduce and which did not, in reality, neither of them were.  He makes the point that there was a reason that he chose that potato to plant.  There was a reason the bee chose that tree to pollinate.  Whether it was the certain color, shape, or size of the plant being helped to reproduce, it had evolved these traits to make it more desirable.  

Mr. Pollan also gives his audience an example of a farm he visited in Virginia.  On this farm the owner raised cattle, sheep, and chickens among other animals, but if you asked the farmer what he was he would reply “a grass farmer”.  Grass was the basis of his whole business.  The process this man used was slightly complex, but proved that we as people do not have to destroy the land to get food in return.  He would have the cattle graze a certain patch of land for a set amount of time, then he would move them and after three days, he would bring in the chickens.  As the chickens were let loose in the field, they would search through the cow manure for the grubs that would be hatching there.  While searching through the manure for food, the chickens were spreading it and in turn making their own feces, thus fertilizing the grass.  After a few weeks, the grass would grow tremendously and the farmer would start the process over again by either bringing in another species he raised on his farm, or by making hay for the winter.  From this process, the farmer would produce 40-thousand pounds of beef, 30-thousand pounds of pork, 25-thousand dozen eggs, one-thousand turkeys, one-thousand rabbits all on only one-hundred acres of land.  He does not destroy the land, but rather gives every organism what it wants and needs to survive.  The animals are provided with food and the plants receive nutrients from the animals’ waste.  

If we do not think about such matters as food from the perspective of the plants themselves, how can we truly appreciate some of the very organisms that give us life?

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