Design Plan for My Research Paper:Concussions Casuing Dementia

Design Plan for Research

                My purpose for my research paper is I want my classmates, teachers, and potential colleagues to think about the correlation between concussions and later mental diseases like dementia. Although I will be focusing on the question if concussions can cause early onset dementia, but also what causes a person with a concussion to develop dementia oppose to a person with a concussion that never develops dementia. Even with research, there are people and associations that do not believe that concussions can cause dementia. This design plan will go over my strategies, medium, arrangement, production and more for the making of my research paper

                To make a successful research paper that will get my argument across, I need good strategies. First strategies is to collect good sources that can back up my argument and make my research paper correct. Another strategy for my paper is to define and clearly explain any terms, so that even an average person (classmate without medical background) can read and understand my paper. In addition, when defining terms make everything clearer and make the paper understandable. I will be focusing on what actually causes a concussed person to develop dementia and not just if there is a correlation. Doing this will not only address the problem of how it is developed, but what or who is the blame. These strategies are the ones I will use during my paper to successful get my argument across to my audience.

                I will be writing a paper for a number of reasons. The obvious reason is that my assignment is to write a research PAPER. I will also write a paper because I think with the goal in mind and the period I have a paper is the only way I can achieve my goal. I would like to add charts, photos, or even a video (not likely for the video) to make my paper more interesting and stick better with my audience. I will post my paper in my blog allowing the world to see it so my medium will also be a blog, but still really a paper.

                Although I do not have my complete arrangement for the whole paper yet, I have a good idea of the arrangement.  Of course, I will need to start with an introduction into my topic and my thesis introducing my argument. Then I will define and explain concussions, dementia, and other terms that could be confusing to parts of my audience. Then I will go into data on whether or not there is a correlation between concussions and dementia. After that, I will explain facts on what could cause concussions to become dementia. In addition, to who or what is to blame for the causes or if someone or something should be blamed. Then I shall end my paper with a conclusion with closing remarks to wrap up my paper and a last chance to get my point across and maybe even have a call to action.

                I have twenty-four days to complete my research paper. I have already started researching by using our library databases to find articles on concussions, concussions causing dementia, and even causes for professional athletes with/dying of dementia. I still need to do a full research of those topics and not just glance at articles. I will take notes on articles I find and look up professional research in this area to help with my research. I looked up the cause Justice for Jeff and that people in England fighting the Football Association, FA, (soccer football) that promised research of head injuries from heading the soccer ball and development of dementia, but have yet to do a single piece of research. I would also like to look into the research the used in the recent NFL lawsuit. I do believe there is a correlation and I think that certain sports are at higher risk of concussion. I believe that multiple concussions and more severe concussions can cause dementia. Those are both things I believe, but I want to have proof for one way or the other so I can know for sure. I believe those things without complete proof because I have first-hand have seen concussions and their side effects and because of recent lawsuits, I read about and see on the news. Therefore, to write this paper after I complete my research I will make my annotated bibliography. Then I will make an outline, which will turn in to my first draft of my paper. I will then have my peers and myself edit and revise my paper until it has turned into my final draft.

                To make my research paper successful I need to use strategy, use a paper as my medium, arrange it correctly, and produce it in my time line. I want people to notice the correlation between concussions and the development of dementia. In addition, I want to cover what causes a concussed person to develop dementia.

                

P.S. I'm still working on the name

Photo Essay

Design Plan for Photo Essay

                My purpose is to inform my audience about the dangers of concussions. I know people know some of the obvious dangers of concussions, but people need to know how common and the hidden dangers of concussion. I know I want my pictures to tell a story of getting a concussion so that the reader can follow it. I want people to see the different ways to get a concussion show it is not only for athletes. I also want some of the symptoms to show how dangerous and scary concussions are. My audience will not just be my classmates and professors, but will also be interested people, people with concussions or even medical professionals. In class, the students and professor will be reading mine along with everyone else one after another, so I need to make mine stand out. In the blog the whole world can see it so I need it to be professional, but it still needs to catch the average person’s eye.

                I am going to use a series of photographs with a narrative and captions to get my message across. I need to focus on how people get concussions and symptoms of one. I also want to show in the beginning that you can get a concussion from sports, but people can also get it from other traumatic events injuring the head. I need to take a picture of someone going through the symptoms of a concussion, and I think my brother, Kyle will be up to the challenge. I know I cannot accurately photograph every symptom, but I will try to photograph all of them, and just cut out the ones that do not clearly portray the symptom. Since my phone is the camera I will be using I will need to email them to my computer so I can save them and put them in my essay.

                This is a serious topic, but I do not want my audience to think that I am a super strict safety person that lives in fear of a concussion. I also do not want my audience to live in fear of a concussion after reading my essay. Therefore, I could in my captions, talk about the correct way to treat concussions, so concussions do not seem like an injury that could ruin someone life. I could also potentially throw in a joke or some humor to lighten the mood a little, and make me seem less strict. I know my essay needs to be focused and professional looking, but to avoid being too informative and boring I need to make it funny and interesting. I want my audience to feel informed, but I want them to enjoy reading the essay. My argument is about showing the dangers of concussions. Since none of the symptoms will seem like a positive, but rather a negative, people logically will view them as dangerous. I know I need to put a caption for each picture or group of picture so that my audience can understand clearly, what the picture is trying to portray.

                I will start with a narrative before any photographs to introduce my argument and start my story to my audience. After that, I will have two different photos of someone getting a concussion, with one caption explaining how in both situation you can get a concussion. Then I will show some initial symptoms of a concussion. After that, I will show some more serious and long-term effects of a concussion. This way it seems more like a story of someone dealing with a concussion.

                I will test the photo essay, by showing it first to Kyle since he is the model in the pictures. I also will be having someone from my class peer edit the photo essay. I will take in to consideration both of their reviews and know I was successful if they can clearly understand the photos and caption.

My Photo Essay
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0PjniY3sd-jWC1rSzJzVE05RkZkNGlPdjkwQlF0SWJVYkU4/edit

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0PjniY3sd-jWC1rSzJzVE05RkZkNGlPdjkwQlF0SWJVYkU4/edit

 Did I accomplished my goal?

My main purpose was to show my audience the dangers of concussion. I did show the audience the symptoms of concussion, which are the main dangers of a concussion. I just wish I could have found a way to show the rare, extreme affects of a concussion. (Post-concussion syndrome, Dementia Pugilistic, etc) I did get photos of all of the symptoms of a concussion, to show the dangers with a concussion. I also wanted to get people interested about concussions, which after going the essay you will not at least think about it more than if you did not read my essay. Overall I think it went as close as possible to what I wanted it to.

P.S. I wanted to apologize to my readers, the pictures for some reason come up messed up and a little creepy. That was not intention and my brother does not have a cherry red face (usually). If I knew how to work blogger (and a computer for that matter) better it could come up correctly, but I do not have the skills. I hope you can get pass the off colors and see the purpose behind the essay. Enjoy!

My experience with the photo essay

Bloggers!

Sorry about not blogging for so long, but this semester has been a struggle. I overloaded on credits this semester, maxing out at 18 credit hours. Most of my work is not difficult, just notes in class and study/read out of class. Sounds simple enough right? Well my College Writing class is the class where I do more work then almost all of my class combined. Sounds outrageous right? I know. It has not been that bad, but the last few weeks have been building up to our research project and it has become increasingly harder. To build up in to the research project we are doing another smaller project first. This project is to make a photo essay about your research topic, but before you could do that I needed to collect all my own pictures to put in the essay. Before I could collect photos I had to make a design plan of what I wanted my essay to be about and what I wanted to accomplished with it. (no offense, but all I wanted to accomplished was to get an A) I even had to redo my design to make it better. Before I made a design plan I had to make a statement of purpose for my photo essay that would be based off of. Before we could make a statement of purpose we had to read the chapters and answer questions in the book about making a photo essay, design plan, and statement of purpose. So overall this "little pre-project" might be the death of me. Now before you get the wrong idea, these are very helpful steps in producing a good photo essay and would be very helpful to someone seriously interested in making one. Me? I tried to appreciate that, but I'm the average, lazy college freshmen. I'm still semi-use to the simplicity of high school and think this CW2 class should be just as easy as my CW1 class. For CW1 we wrote a few papers, did a little bit of extra work, and did not have class every few weeks, because our teacher wanted us to spend time on our papers. Easy A for me, but I did not really learn anything from that class. Now if I was good at writing and was not taking CW because it was a needed general education credit I would rather take a class like my CW2. Now before you banish the idea of ever doing a photo essay, I did have fun taking photos of my brother trying to show symptoms of a concussion. I even got to have him be hit in the head with a volleyball multiple times because I could not get the shot. He is a germ freak and I made him put his head in the toilet to pretend throw-up. There was more funny parts, but I don't want to ruin all the pictures for my photo essay, because I plan to put it up. The stress level of mine has significantly gone up with this project. So overall, a photo essay is a good way to help get a direction for a research topic, but is a shit ton of work and I'm not about that.

 I'm sorry the pictures in my analysis will not show up. So I added them as their own post not cropped. As you can tell I'm no professional blogger. I am so sorry, thank you for understanding.

The Design of the ACSM website

Designing the ACSM

                Any person that falls under the umbrella of professionals in sports medicine field know what the American College of Sports Medicine is. Through a rhetorical analysis of the webpage home, I analyzed how effectively and easily the website gets its information across for the viewer. The viewer would mostly be ACSM members or future ACSM members, but since it is a webpage accessible to all with internet; anyone that stumbles on to the page can see it. The main purpose is informing and updating the people about sports medicine is a great way to make people see how it effects their lives. A well-done rhetorical analysis will include ethos, logos, and pathos. In addition, an analysis should include how the text and visual work together. The website overall was well designed and organized to appeal to the audience of the ACSM website and fulfill its purpose of informing and updating the public.

The professionalism of the webpage shows the credibility. The webpage is very organized and well thought out. It follows the social norms of a webpage for an organization. Some of the social norms are having changing pictures with text and links to grab attention and provide basic information with the thirst for more. Another social norm would be to have the logo at the top left; this also shows that this website is for a registered organization. The designers for ACSM followed this social norm shown in this picture.

   Fig. 1. 2014. Matrix Group International, Inc., Web. <http://www.acsm.org/>

As show in Fig. 1, they have their logo in the top left showing that they are a real organization. A social norm is also to have links to social media sites. The organization of the webpage is very professional. The changing pictures with the logo and links to navigate the webpage, more information under that. Side information and login off to the side and out of the way. Putting the link to the designer’s web site at the bottom of the ACSM. This shows that some crazy person in a basement did just not make the webpage, but that a company hired a designer to create a professional and organized webpage.

Everything on the webpage made the way it was with logic and purpose behind it. A lot of the webpage follows social norms of webpages today, which is like that, not to copy everyone else, but to show that it is professional and follows the standards of other professional organization. That is one of the strengths of the webpage and that it can easily be navigate through the many different links. Even the average Joe that is only maybe looking for an article on why after he picked up running his shin started hurting. They have a link made for the average person just looking for an article or information, called public information. This also shows that the webpage is more for members because it makes it seems as though that is link for anyone, but the other ones should be members or future members. That is a weakness, because it could scare away average people from using the page. The purpose of the page is to give out information about sports medicine and scaring away curious people is going against the purpose of the page.

The designer of the webpage tried bringing out the audience’s emotions at different times. All the changing pictures and minimal text is there to grab attention and then make the reader curious to find more information on the picture. The latest news story titles are supposed to bring out our curiosity and the need to stay up to date with the constantly changing medical field. This makes us feel curious and want to read the article and to learn more about the importance of sports medicine. Unlike some organizations looking for donations, that show sad pictures that make people feel guilty, this webpage is strictly for science and curiosity to learn.

How the text and visual work together

For the webpage to be effective, the text needs to work with the visuals. The predominant focus is first on the visual, but it then changes to mainly text. On the website’s homepage, there are really only four visuals. The First visual and text would be the four changing pictures with text and links. They complement each other well because the pictures are helping to grab attention of the reader and representing the text. The text is supposed to make the reader want to know more and follow the link. The visuals help show a preview of what the text is and what that particular event will be. The visual tells you more in a simple way what it is. For example the picture about the conference, has smaller pictures of science images to help people see that it will be a scientific conference giving out information. The visual is the background to the text. The text would be boring and uninteresting and lose a lot of its audience to other less important parts of the webpage without the visuals. There is two smaller visuals, one being the symbol in the logo and the picture of the book. The symbol as shown in fig. 1 helps to associate the symbol with the name so that the symbol could be more recognizable. That is why they put the symbol first then the organization name. The other visual is a small picture of the featured publication.

  Fig. 2. 2014. Matrix Group International, Inc., Web. <http://www.acsm.org/>

In fig. 2, the designer just starts to describe the book, but then has a read more link. This makes the reader curious about the book and want to follow the link to read more and possibly buy the book. They also put the picture there to grab attention and to help the reader know what it looks like, so they can recognize the book. Altogether, even though there are only a handful of visuals on the webpage those visuals work well with the text it goes with.

After my rhetorical analysis of the American College of Sports and Medicine, I can confidently conclude the website overall was organized and designed appealing to the viewers of the ACSM website and fulfill its purpose of informing and updating the public. The purpose of the webpage is still mainly to inform and update people, but also make people curious about sport and exercise science. At first, I thought the audience was mainly ACSM members and future ACSM members, but now I see that it is also for the average person curious about sports medicine. This is just a basic, organized, and professional webpage that follows the social norm for webpages today, but it is effective at getting the information across and making people curious about the information. Overall the techniques used by the designer all had purpose and audience in mind to make the webpage successful.

                                                                                     Work Cited         

2014. Matrix Group International, Inc., Web. <http://www.acsm.org/>