SMC Reflections

This week, we started on the social media campaign and it has revealed so much information to me that I had not known before. I learned that about 20,000 African elephants are killed each year by poachers or hunters for their ivory. I had known that these animals were being killed for their tusks, however, I never really knew that it was at such a large extent. Among all the other problems that elephants face, such as habitat loss, I feel like the poaching issue was the most important to focus on because first of all, they are being killed for sport, and second of all, these horrible people are making a profit for it. This issue isn't in the media a lot and I felt like it was, somewhat, my duty to speak up for these animals who can't advocate for themselves. A solution that I had recently heard about was how professionals can use seismology to track elephant behavior and potentially use it to detect when the animals are in danger. Another solution that I have come across has been organizations training police/rangers to handle poaching issues as well as how to adopt anti-poaching practices. These were the most logical because, although they are small steps, they are very significant to the elephants. If these techniques help save at least a couple elephants, we know that we are doing our job. I also got to learn a lot about the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) organization, as well as the Elephant Voices organization. They both advocate for elephants and their conservation, but WWF also focuses on other endangered animals, which I find amazing. The information on each of their websites allows me to write about statistics that I can sue in my advocate essay, along with suggesting ways the audience can help. One of my best tweets was how elephants are important to not only the environment, but to humans as well. I thought this tweet was impactful because it gave warnings on how the loss of the elephant race can affect humans as well, which will encourage people to take action. If people feel a sense that their livelihoods are in danger, they are more likely going to take precautions and find solutions to the issues.

Here is the infographic that I made and tweeted out, with intentions to educate my peers and others who see it on Twitter. I focused my infographic on a summary of how elephants are impacted by poachers and why it is crucial to take action because I felt like it's always good to know the basic information before speaking out about the matters.

Among this week's content, I have found many ways to approach my argument about elephant poaching and one of them being, appeals to emotions. I find that I, personally, found myself being more swayed by the speaker's words when they used pathos. Emotions play a large role in our decisions that we make, and I believe that if I can articulate my writing in a way that will make the readers feel empathy or a sense of urgency, I can effectively sway them to advocate against elephant poaching. I also plan on using ethos in my word choices and well-known individuals, which will display my credibility. Logos is an amazing technique to display the importance of conservation because the large numbers of data and statistics allow the audience to see how real the issue is and the large scale of it. A quote that I especially found myself being attached to was by Jeremy Bentham, which stated, "The question is not can they reason nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"

Lastly, we had peer review for the Literature Review Essays and responses to the a discussion post. I think these activities assisted me in seeing how I can improve my own writing since there are many talented writers in this class. A great piece of writing that I reviewed this week was by Jhanavi Jupudi. They did a great job of answering every part of the prompt for the essay and the way they wrote their paper inspired me to adopt new vocabulary and structure. I think one of the good pieces of advice that I gave was how they could potentially replace some of their words with synonyms and how they could effectively relate all their sources to each other. One of the best advices I received was to elaborate more on the outside sources that I mentioned. I noticed that I had briefly brought up the author's names rather than going into detail fo what they had discussed and what their study was on.