Peer revision

One of the main things that helped me this semester the most with my writing was peer revision. Peer revision helped me because when you spend a lot of time writing a paper sometimes you miss small things and even big things. So with peer revision you have a new pair of eyes to go back over your paper so they can catch the problems. Also peers can give you good advice on how to improve your paper so it is good to have them too look over your paper even if you feel it is complete. The time I can remeber that I was so thankful for the peer review was when I was writing the beginning of my research paper I had a friend in class look at it and they helped me a lot. They helped me understand where I needed to take my paper as in who my audience should be and how I should approach it. Writing is a process and I think that one of the most important things about it is getting feedback from your potential audience and peers. When writing I will always get peer advice because I know the importance of having someone elses point of view. I think that peer revision was one of the most impotant things that I gained knowledge about this semester.

Appeals

One of the most interesting things I learned this semester were the diffrent appeals and how to accuratly use them, as in what appeals to use in certain types of papers. The first appeal we learned about was ethos which is an appeal that is based on the character of the speaker, relying solely on the reputation of another. This is something that we used in our research paper. We took the information from sources and used them to varify our points on a topic. The key is to use credible sources such as with my paper since it was over ADHD is was smart to use sources relating to medicine and medical research. Another appeal we learned about is logos. Logos is an appeal based on logic or reason, this kind of appeal is usually used with companies or large corporations, and sometimes with scholarly documents. This is because they are in a trying to give you the cold hard facts that are reasonable so you will buy their product or realize what the are talking about through searching through your own basic reason. The last appeal we learned about it pathos which is personally the kind of writinng that I like to do this appeal, appeals to readers emotions. Advertisements are usually veered toward your emotions, when you see those poor african children you want to send money because it hurts your heart to see them living the way they do, because they got ahold of your emotions. All of these appeals are important to know about because you can use them in a variety of places, so I was very interested in learing about them this semester.

Who am I trying to reach

In my paper I included only quality information that I knew would educate and inform my audience. My intended audience is parents and others who either have ADHD or are affected by it on a regular basis. I also was intending to help those who have just learned that either they or someone in their family has ADHD, so that they understand the condition and how to accuratly treat it the best way for the individual. The main point to my paper is to educate the un-educated about ADHD and how serious it is. So hopefully we can stop all the critizism against this disorder. If we stop the critizism then maybe those affected will seek better care for their disorder so that they can control it before it becomes a serious issue that is hard to cope with. ADHD is easily treated and I intend to inform my readers of that the more eduacated about ADHD our society is the better off we are to keep developing better ways to treat it along with breaking the sterotypes our society puts around this disorder.

Suprising

While researching ADHD from time to time I would find out something that would really suprise me. The thing that I found out that suprised me the most was that individuals that have ADHD usually stop taking medication for it when they get older. And the worst part is the only real reason that was said was because they got embarassed of having this so called child's disorder. So as a society we have put so much negativity into having these kinds of disorders that affected individuals will go so far as to stop taking medication because they are embarassed of it. I think that this shows a great deal of immaturity and lack of respect that our society has for its own people. It is one thing to ridicule another society because they are diffrent but we are talking about our own society and we act as though this disorder is so bad that we cause those who it affects the worst to cease treatment because they do not want to be made fun of or lose an oppurtunity because of a problem they really can't help.

What I learned from my research

In researching ADHD, and collecting data I learned many interesting things about ADHD as a disorder, how its treated and so on. The most interesting thing I found is that ADHD never goes away. It is not something that you just grow out of ever time it is something that stays with you all the way into adulthood. Most people treat ADHD as a condition only in children that develops because of lack of discipline or quality discipline. All through out my research they emphasized that ADHD is a serious chronic condition. This means that it is not due to poor discipline or anything like that it is simply just a disorder that an individual develops and some researchers believe it to be hereditary. All in all i found my research to be extremly informative and the one of the most interesting things I learned is that you never grow out of ADHD. Which makes me realize why it is so important to treat it and treat it accuratly so that it doesn't control you, you can control it.

Problems

I honestly did not encounter too many problems with my research that were too hard to handle on my own or with a little help. But one major problem that did make my research a little more complicted is that in being really specific with my topic I allowed a small window of information. I would search for hours for information that would follow the topic of my paper. I initially found a lot of research but in narrowing my topic my research began to fade because is would not directly correspond with my paper. To solve this problem of lack of resources to back my information I looked for articles that said the opposite that, articles that completly disagreed with me and put those in my paper. But with putting in articles that did not agree with what I was saying I had to come up with a clever way to prove them wrong and show that my view was the better one and that theirs was flawed in some way. This taught me a great deal as frustrating as it seemed at first it showed me that sometimes you have to think outside the box and figure out what exacly the argument against you would be so you can better argue point because you are knowledgeable of what they would question about your topic and you can counter act it.

Tedious

The most tedious and meticulous thing I had to read this semester was actually two diffrent scholarly journals from Ebsco. But they are not just your common user friendly article they were scientific researchs. So inside of the article there was quite a bit of gargin and huge words that I had no idea what they were because they were like scientific words used in studies. But after reading and re- reading and working deligently to try and understand these two sources I eventually made sense of them. Not only did I make sense of them but I used both in my research paper because they had a great deal to do with my topic they were just a little bit wordy and difficult to read every now and then. Really the hardest part of the experiments to understand were all the tables they were set up so that they correlated with the experiment well but they used a lot of vocabulary that was confusing to me and described things that I really didn't understand most of the time. But with research and a little outside help from individuals I conquered this beast and tamed it as my own.