The Literature Review and SMC Plan

This week we finally began our literature review essay which is what we have been working towards since week 1. As we worked up to the moment of writing the first draft of the essay, I found that the major assignments that solidified my subject and how I approached it were the Connect readings, Safina annotations, and Twitter posts. The Connect readings aided me in approaching the readings and it gave me a peak into elephant cognition during one of the weeks when we had to annotate an article. The connect gave me a sort of structure when it came to annotations and allowed me to establish a routine to analyze readings which really helped me when it came to my research. The Safina reading on elephants also pushed me in the direction to choose this species as my focus point because these animals are so complex and intelligent. There was so much to unpack from them and it gave me several topics to choose from such as cognition, intelligence, social behavior, or communication. I ultimately chose cognition because I felt like it was the foundation to all of the other topics of animal science. Lastly, the Twitter activities were essential in my preparation of the essay because they provided me with many sources to explore and since it was a collaborative activity that included the entire 39C animal writing classes, it was a plethora of sources and topics to choose from. It allowed me to explore things from different perspectives and gave me insight to what my peers thought.

When it came to writing the actual essay, I feel like I tried to reach the minimum requirements as best that I could. I am not completely confident if I did them well or not but I kept making sure I checked back to the rubric to see if I was hitting all the points or not. The objectives that I feel confident in is the thesis and conclusion. This is because I felt like my thesis was pretty clear in what I was trying to achieve, which was to make the audience think about their treatment of elephants and whether this treatment was ethical or not. I am quite confident in my conclusion because I feel as if I closed it on a powerful note that pretty much summed up the purpose of the essay and the topics discussed within it. I don't feel as confident in my introduction or my body paragraphs because I tend to have a hard time putting my thoughts into words and I found myself getting overwhelmed. When I received feedback on my introduction, it really clarified what I should not do when introducing a topic. I approached the introduction in a way that I used to do and now that I realized I shouldn't make general claims, I struggled with finding a new approach to it. I am not as confident in my body paragraphs because I don't know if I got my point across enough or if I mainly spent it summarizing the study. Overall, I feel like I need to work on being able to properly word my thought down and get into a rhythm of writing frequently.

Lastly, in my social media campaign, I plan on continuing with my subject of elephants but mainly focusing on the poaching aspect of them. I chose to campaign on this issue because first of all I feel like having guns or weapons with the intent to kill animals is wrong and secondly, because I feel like poaching is not talked about enough in mainstream media. The only recent thing that I have seen about elephant hunting or poaching in mainstream media was when a video of thee NRA executive was going around. I, myself, do not know enough about the poaching issue so this would be a very educating topic for me to explore. The campaigns or organizations that I found, that speak out about elephant conservation, are Elephant Voices and World Wildlife Fund, both of which I found through Twitter.