Margaret Curtis, Global and Environmental Justice major, Minneapolis MN
As a student who researches for multiple classes, I care about accuracy and honesty in the sources I read. A lot of information is biased, but the sources of this information rarely admit to said bias. This is especially true with new outlets, such as CNN and FOX, each on one side of the political spectrum. Journalism is meant to be accurate information without underlying opinions, but the reality is that this is not true. For example, the fifties brought McCarthyism, and with that was a push for narrow media coverage. News outlets, because of their sponsors, were limited to language and stories that further pushed his agenda. Funding for news sources today is still an issue that gives control more to the sponsor than the outlet. This carries into newspapers as well, and companies like the Washington Post lean one way or another. As a writer, I am willing to admit that I have a bias towards pro-choice groups, and that my presentation shows some of that. I know keeping one’s own opinion out of a subject can be difficult, and this is why I value and respect other writers who recognize their personal lens in their writing.
Writing must not only be honest, but concise. During my research for a project on the abortion debate, my partner, Shade Dudley, and I had difficulty cutting down our content to the most important pieces. There is a lot to cover on this issue, from social media, to presidential statements and campaigns, to the specific wording of pro-choice and pro-life groups. The history of the issue is also thoroughly documented in the last half century, and this makes finding the best information difficult, due to such a high abundance of sources. The various factors involved were overwhelming, and our challenge was to determine what was the best information to use, and how to use it.
Another challenge to our research was a skewed survey. We conducted one that asked questions about the survey taker’s political affiliation, opinions on abortion rights, and impressions of pro-life and pro-choice groups. We were only able to reach young students from this area, who are liberal and mostly pro-choice. We received very few surveys from people of conservative or pro-life background. Additionally, all of our survey takers were under the age of 25. This made the results very imbalanced. However, the results did prove our theory that the political climate in an area does affect attitudes toward abortion, since Washington, and specifically Bellingham, are predominantly Blue (see source below).
We did, however, organize our information neatly, and our visual presentation is impressive. Our research proposal poster is eye-catching and interesting, and was successful in grabbing the interest of our audience. We used colors that were pleasing to the eye, yet intriguing, and did not overfill the poster with content that would overwhelm the audience. Instead, the poster felt approachable.
Our research is on how language affects opinion on the abortion debate. We focused specifically on political attitudes and statements by presidents, and the persuasive language used by each side of the debate. We have created a website that you can navigate to read about our research more in-depth. You may access our work here:
https://wp.wwu.edu/persuasivelanguageandabortion/ (Links to an external site.)
https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/washington/bellingham (Links to an external site.)(additional source)
Shade Dudley, Political Science Major, from Richland, WA
As a political science major, my passion for writing included persuasive and analytical writing. Working in a political field, my dream is to become an ambassador for the United Nations with a focus on population issues, I’ll have to write about a subject in brief and detailed terms. I need to work on being able to get people as invested in a subject/issue that I am addressing. As a student, I wanted to focus on improving my weakness of run-on-sentences. Our teacher would have us start out with a word count and once we wrote that much, we had to cut it down to all the necessary information. This helped my ability to go from detail-oriented to brief writing. Although this didn’t specifically help with my run-on-sentence problem, it gave me tools to recognize when I’m using unnecessary information in those types of sentences. For example, while making our poster for class I had a word block around 400 words, and after going through it and getting to the basic facts, it was less than 200.
My partner, Margaret Curtis, and I chose abortion as our research topic for English 101. Since this is an English class, we were told this topic would need to focus on communication, so we agreed to focus on the influence that persuasive language has on the abortion debate. During this project our challenge was to downsize our information, while remaining accurate and informative. Since our research was extensive, it was hard to figure out what information we wanted our audiences to know vs. the information they needed to know. For instance, we had information on court cases on abortion, detailed accounts of pro-life and pro-choice movements before and after Roe v. Wade, and political climates of individual states as well as the presidential political leanings. We had so much information that it made our topic broad. So, we scraped the history of abortion movements, and detailed account of legislation, and turned our focus onto political figures and public opinion. It was a struggle when we thought we couldn’t downsize anymore information without jeopardizing the audience’s ability to understand our topic. While making the poster we realized we still had too many words, but we couldn’t take any more facts out. To problem solve we went back and edited our language. By cutting down a few words in a sentence we were able to keep the same level of data without having a bulk of text. Due to this our visual appeal improved, and our content stayed the same.
Our Project 9 Research Webtext, linked below, presents research on persuasive language’s affect in the abortion debate. It focuses on how public figures and political climate in states affects individual’s opinions on abortion and how these factors contribute to how abortion is talked about in our daily lives, and how it is handled in legislation.