Research Essay

In my conference with Dr. Ballenger, he really helped me to focus in on my research essay, specifically what I struggled with the most which was how to write my essay for a normal audience, for the masses. I had to decide on a way in which to grab my audience and make them care about my topic, which is Tuberculosis in the United States and why we should be concerned about it. It is easy for me to write about the topic if I was writing for people who actually care about what the disease and what it can do to people in the United States. I'm trying to find more sources that are less scientific and are more relatable for the common person. After completing the in class work with the dialogue boxes, I felt a little more comfortable with my paper. Being forced to answer "What's the big deal?" helped me to hone in on what matters the most and how to convince people the met effectively. It seemed like I wrote almost a mini summary of my paper highlighting the basic ideas of why it's a big deal. I believe that I have enough of an outline now to begin writing the paper and how it should flow.

Exercise 4.2 helped me to decide more on the "talking points" of my research project. It helped me with my research question but really helped me focus on what I want to write about to back up on opinion while also being objective in the research. I have struggled with narrowing down my topics to talk about and make them more relatable. Today in class really made me decide on what facts and opinions are the most strong and how to use them in my paper.