Editors Note
We selected the piece June 26th 2012 to be in our online magazine because it shows how one of our own editors, Angie Howe, and her family have been personally affected by our mental health care system within prisons and jails. It shows that the average American family can be affected by these policies. Our hope is that this piece will help our readers connect to our magazine more as a whole and realize that these issue do affect them even if it is not directly.
We found the piece on the documentary The Released to be a good addition to our magazine because it not only offers valuable information about the mental health care system within prisons and jails and the consequences of what will happen if this health care system is not improved but it offers the readers another source to check out if they want more information on the subject.
The political cartoon The Prosecutor and the Psychiatrist was included as a rendition of a report entitle Improving the Mental Health Care System within Jails and Prisons. We chose not to put the Improving the Mental Health Care System within Jails and Prisons piece in the magazine because we thought we could represent it better within the political cartoon and that it would also add a creative piece to the magazine.This cartoon shows a prosecutor visiting a psychiatrist because of the great amount of guilt he feels from years of sentencing mental ill individuals to prison and jail instead of a mental hospital.
We put in Hobby Lobby Vs. Affordable Health Care because it focues on the main arguments for women's health care which is contraception. We thought this piece would stand out as an important issue in our magizine because many female Americans are now facing or will face this issue as they make the
transition from childhood to being a young adult and then into adulthood. Contraception for women is highly needed and consiversial issue because it is not just used by normal women, but for all types whether you are a rape victim, poor, people who are not ready to have kids, etc. This piece provides information on contraception uses and that arguments on President Obama's birth control coverage madate.
The other paper we chose to put in our magaizine is a Contraception Coverage on the hot topic issue of if contraception should be covered by all of the insurance companies. It digs deeper into the contraception arguments and birth control pills and discusses how many people use it and how it affects us
when people don’t use it.
We chose to add another cartoon to our magaizne for some variation. This cartoon is entilted Insurance Coverage. It depictes a young girl going into her doctor to recieve the morning after pill (Plan B) and her doctor informing her that her insurance doesn't cover it because she works
for a Catholic Compnay who does not prived coverage for any typ of contraception.
We didn't use Kunga's memoir because we felt that it didn't have a strong point about health care. It mostly focused on his past health stories but they didn't have anything to do with health related problems that we face in the United States.
During this writing and research process we discovered that revising is not always as easy as it may sound. We shared our pieces with each and went over them together offering incite and suggestions of ideas to change and expand on. We soon found that when we would revise our own pieces we would more often than not come back with something we thought was well revised and changed only to be told by our
group that we didn't actually change very much.
We learned that the writing process for each genre is pretty similar. It's the same old writing, rewriting, finding more resources and information, and more rewriting. Some advice we would like to give to other groups and individuals working on a similar project would be to focus on the details of each individual paper. The stronger your papers are the stronger your magazine will be as a whole. Also there is not a limit on how many times you can reread and rewrite your paper. Do not be afraid to delete big portions of your paper or add in additional information that may change the direction of your paper.
We wrote in multiple genres. We have memoir, two reviews, and a position piece as well as two political cartoons that were adapted from two other pieces we choose not to include in our magazine.
We used MLA format for our all of our citations. We cited our sources as best as we could. We could not find the authors or publication dates for some our sources but we made sure that all the information that was available was put into the citations so they would be as accurate as possible.
We feel like we did a good job at adapting our strategies and styles of argumentation for the given writing situation. We were able to improve on our sentence structure and giving more information while also improving our writing. For example, in June 26th 2012 we were able to take this sentence, “A cold shock ran through my body as I finally noticed the blood pouring from the upper right side of his chest, it dripped down his body to form a small puddle on my floor” (Howe 4), and rewrite to where it read, “A cold shock ran through my body as I finally noticed the blood pouring from Cameron's upper right side of his chest, it flowed down his body soaking his clothes, forming a small puddle on my bedroom floor” (Howe 4) as you can see in just a few words we were able to add more detail that added a better visual picture of what was going on. Another example of us being able to improve our writing is within the same piece. This time we took the sentence, “I lied Cameron down and grabbed the nearest thing to apply pressure, a jacket” (Howe 4), as you can tell this sentence doesn't over much to the paper but when we rewrote it to read, “I quickly recalled all the information about first aid I had ever learned, I lied Cameron down and grabbed the nearest absorbent material, a jacket, to apply pressure” (Howe 4). After the rewrite the sentence now gives more information, through it we can feel the narrators panic and worry where before they was no emotion.
We worked very well together in collaborating on our individual pieces of work and with helping each other improve. We were honest in what we thought needed to be changed, cut out, and revised within each others work. While we could have done better at editing our pieces to get ride of grammar and surface errors we still feel like we did a good job at rewriting and improving on our information and writing as a whole.
We found the piece on the documentary The Released to be a good addition to our magazine because it not only offers valuable information about the mental health care system within prisons and jails and the consequences of what will happen if this health care system is not improved but it offers the readers another source to check out if they want more information on the subject.
The political cartoon The Prosecutor and the Psychiatrist was included as a rendition of a report entitle Improving the Mental Health Care System within Jails and Prisons. We chose not to put the Improving the Mental Health Care System within Jails and Prisons piece in the magazine because we thought we could represent it better within the political cartoon and that it would also add a creative piece to the magazine.This cartoon shows a prosecutor visiting a psychiatrist because of the great amount of guilt he feels from years of sentencing mental ill individuals to prison and jail instead of a mental hospital.
We put in Hobby Lobby Vs. Affordable Health Care because it focues on the main arguments for women's health care which is contraception. We thought this piece would stand out as an important issue in our magizine because many female Americans are now facing or will face this issue as they make the
transition from childhood to being a young adult and then into adulthood. Contraception for women is highly needed and consiversial issue because it is not just used by normal women, but for all types whether you are a rape victim, poor, people who are not ready to have kids, etc. This piece provides information on contraception uses and that arguments on President Obama's birth control coverage madate.
The other paper we chose to put in our magaizine is a Contraception Coverage on the hot topic issue of if contraception should be covered by all of the insurance companies. It digs deeper into the contraception arguments and birth control pills and discusses how many people use it and how it affects us
when people don’t use it.
We chose to add another cartoon to our magaizne for some variation. This cartoon is entilted Insurance Coverage. It depictes a young girl going into her doctor to recieve the morning after pill (Plan B) and her doctor informing her that her insurance doesn't cover it because she works
for a Catholic Compnay who does not prived coverage for any typ of contraception.
We didn't use Kunga's memoir because we felt that it didn't have a strong point about health care. It mostly focused on his past health stories but they didn't have anything to do with health related problems that we face in the United States.
During this writing and research process we discovered that revising is not always as easy as it may sound. We shared our pieces with each and went over them together offering incite and suggestions of ideas to change and expand on. We soon found that when we would revise our own pieces we would more often than not come back with something we thought was well revised and changed only to be told by our
group that we didn't actually change very much.
We learned that the writing process for each genre is pretty similar. It's the same old writing, rewriting, finding more resources and information, and more rewriting. Some advice we would like to give to other groups and individuals working on a similar project would be to focus on the details of each individual paper. The stronger your papers are the stronger your magazine will be as a whole. Also there is not a limit on how many times you can reread and rewrite your paper. Do not be afraid to delete big portions of your paper or add in additional information that may change the direction of your paper.
We wrote in multiple genres. We have memoir, two reviews, and a position piece as well as two political cartoons that were adapted from two other pieces we choose not to include in our magazine.
We used MLA format for our all of our citations. We cited our sources as best as we could. We could not find the authors or publication dates for some our sources but we made sure that all the information that was available was put into the citations so they would be as accurate as possible.
We feel like we did a good job at adapting our strategies and styles of argumentation for the given writing situation. We were able to improve on our sentence structure and giving more information while also improving our writing. For example, in June 26th 2012 we were able to take this sentence, “A cold shock ran through my body as I finally noticed the blood pouring from the upper right side of his chest, it dripped down his body to form a small puddle on my floor” (Howe 4), and rewrite to where it read, “A cold shock ran through my body as I finally noticed the blood pouring from Cameron's upper right side of his chest, it flowed down his body soaking his clothes, forming a small puddle on my bedroom floor” (Howe 4) as you can see in just a few words we were able to add more detail that added a better visual picture of what was going on. Another example of us being able to improve our writing is within the same piece. This time we took the sentence, “I lied Cameron down and grabbed the nearest thing to apply pressure, a jacket” (Howe 4), as you can tell this sentence doesn't over much to the paper but when we rewrote it to read, “I quickly recalled all the information about first aid I had ever learned, I lied Cameron down and grabbed the nearest absorbent material, a jacket, to apply pressure” (Howe 4). After the rewrite the sentence now gives more information, through it we can feel the narrators panic and worry where before they was no emotion.
We worked very well together in collaborating on our individual pieces of work and with helping each other improve. We were honest in what we thought needed to be changed, cut out, and revised within each others work. While we could have done better at editing our pieces to get ride of grammar and surface errors we still feel like we did a good job at rewriting and improving on our information and writing as a whole.