As we left the first week of class behind, we diverged from basic topics and began to dig into the specific class content and activities.
Tuesday’s class consisted of a deeper dive into our assigned readings from the Tar Heel Writing Guide through a group forum activity and student-generated rhetorical charts. Each of the four groups were assigned a different set of questions regarding the “Intro to the Natural Sciences” and “The Writing Process” chapters of THWG, and they were answered and published on the class forum. We then went over the published answers as a whole class, and this served as a very engaging way to review and analyze this information that will be very vital to our first unit project. By writing down different elements of a rhetorical situation and passing our papers around, everyone particpated in an exercise that led to the creation of our very first student-generated rhetorical charts. I really enjoyed this activity due to the fact that it forced you to quickly think on your feet and use other people’s ideas to come up with something of your own. We also briefly went over the unit 1 assignment prompt in preparation for Thursday’s class, and were tasked with coming up with three scientific topics that we would be interested in researching and sending in our student bios.
We met in the Undergraduate Libray for Thursday’s class, and we were taught how to utilize the UNC library’s many resources in order to conduct research for our scientific topics for the unit 1 project. Our assigned readings in preparation for this class, “Conducting Primary and Secondary Research”, were very helpful to me as I thought about how I was gonna approach citing my resources, navigating different platforms, and determing credible sources. My three chosen topics were the correlation between intelligence and depression, the ethics involving homeopathic medicine, and the concept of the paleo diet being the optimal diet for humans. We were shown a powerpoint that educated us on how to use the UL in order to get research help and find relevant and reliable scholarly sources for our research topic. I narrowed down my options and chose the correlation between intelligence and depression to analyze and research using a worksheet and three databases provided by UNC. My favorite database to use was Academic Search Premier because I believed it to be very specific, including alot of reliable sources, highlighted our key search words, and gave us the option to include multiple search words. Our homework for class on Tuesday consisted of submitting our rough draft of Feeder 1.1 via Sakai forum, and we had to look at some readings regarding references, citations, and sources.
I am looking forward to the Unit 1 assignment largely because it includes writing a popular health article, and i have never done anything similar to that in any of my past english classes. I feel as though my former english classes consisted heavily of solely writing essays that analyzed works of fiction, and I dont really have much experience with anything else. Im also really excited to revise my classmate’s Feeder 1.1 worksheets because I dont have any experience with revison as well. I can’t wait to utilize these new resources and exercises in order to create my health article and become a better writer overall.
Link to library power point: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LUMkjzENdtjDXkZE6U7Cv7JSRO5Y1SmSOReihxdeXcA/edit#slide=id.g6d9b96fe64_0_0
Link to library resources: http://go.unc.edu/105libraryday
Link to photos: https://library.unc.edu/places/study/ul-book-stacks-n-z/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/elearningindustry.com/10-online-research-tools-every-online-learner-know/amp 
