Reflection

During the course of writing about my topic in the form of three essays, I learned a lot about the conditions people have endured and initiatives people have taken over the course of the Ebola Epidemic. I researched about the ways treatment is different in Africa compared to America and recognized an important issue. This is important for my future work because I want to go into public health, so it only seems right that I have researched one of the most important public health topics in all of history. During the course of writing my first essay, I started out writing about just medical conditions in general in the world compared to medical conditions in more developed countries. But I soon realized that all of my examples and content was focused on Ebola and West Africa, since it’s the most relevant example to my topic. As I did more research I found out that the issue of the lack of medical resources extended further than just medicine. Proper hospital beds and equipment were also scarce. The issue of lack of resources in West Africa has been very prevalent among the years. Several doctors and healthcare professionals have written about conditions in both America and West Africa by comparing and contrasting them. This led me to the primary focus of the second project-the rhetorical analysis. The Rhetorical Analysis was unique in the way that it allowed me to explore other people’s already researched topics similar to mine. It also let me compare and contrast the way each method of communication the authors used affected the overall impact of the artifact. For example, my second artifact I looked at was an image. The common phrase “an image depicts a thousand words” was true in this case. I noticed that the image of Africans laying on tattered mattresses on the floor was more powerful than a report indicating the number of deaths. I felt this project was much easier for me to compose since I had already formed a good understanding of the topic because of the prior Investigative Research project. I learned through this project that there are several different ways and rhetorical appeals that authors use to get their point across. Genres like images and posters are more attentive and in some cases have more impacts than any text-based genre. Text-based genres are more factual and have more leeway when it comes to how to get a point across. In some aspects text based genres are more persuasive, but in my case, to best understand the realities in West Africa, an image needed to be used. The third project tied all of what I learned about rhetorical appeals and genres together since I was now composting my own genres. Since I learned from the second project that images were the most useful in depicting the realities of Ebola, I decided to make a short and informative poster about Ebola. In order for people to understand how Ebola was affecting people, they need to know about Ebola. The next two genres I used were both text-based, each reaching out to a different audience. The main takeaway about genres and rhetorical appeals I learned was that there are hundreds of ways to communicate an issue. By composing my own genres I learned that there are subcategories for how you can present the different forms of communications. Stories, poems, and reports are only three ways under the larger umbrella of text-based communication. Since I want to go into Public Health, topics like that are very common. These projects helped me recognize one of the most important issues in my field, and now after researching and composing I can say that I feel confident enough to tackle this issue head on.