Historical Conversations Project and the Advocacy Project
Historical Conversation Project
First & Second Draft
The HCP Objectives and Drafting Process
Click here to download original file of the final draft with pictures and correct formatting.
Revision Strategy
The first draft is never perfect. My plan for the HCP revision involved going back to the articles themselves and making sure to include key authors that played an important part of the topic and addressing the things that they did was connecting it to other researchers' work. I found another research article and replace one that my instructor thought was not good enough. I also added transitioning sentences with key words that signaled the discussion of a new topic.
The HCP is an extensive research and writing project that allows one to explore various academic and scholarly publications written by well-renowned authors and professors in prestigious journals and magazines. The main objective of this project was to provide a historical perspective on a topic under animal science and review scientific literature throughout the years and up to the present day that supports a main controlling idea while maintaining a scholarly tone. Other objectives also included citing as much scientific review possible to establish credibility. This projecct fulfills the research aspect of this course because it engages us in finding formal writings published in the academic world and condensing them down into a neat, organized paper.
In order to approach this project, I had to look for the first instances of scientific reserach about my topic, pig cognition, which dated back to the 19th century and continued on to the present day. I used the university's research sources such as Academic Search Compete and Web of Science. I then analyzed all of my scientific literature resources and developed a cohesive essay about them.
The first draft was approached with a rather broader mindset becase I was more focused on trying to undrstand the actual research articles themselves, and so the HCP was rather rushed and had detached reviews of the studies without effectively linking them together. I did not feel particularly proud of this draft because it was not the best reflection of my writing abilities because of the choppy paragraphs. Challenges that I encountered was trying to find a strong controlling idea because I needed to link all of my paragraphs together.
The second draft was a more exhaustive process than it should have been because I ended p rewriting many of my paragraphs in order to make the flow better. In this draft, I approached it while thinking of the bigger picture in mind since I already knew what my studies were about. This time I focused on the thesis and the controlling idea to seamlessly transition throughout the paper. This was definitely a great challenge for myself.
Proof of Revision
Objective: Transitions
This revision shows proof that my transitions were made more cleanly and less choppy in the final draft as seen on the right. Before (picture on the left) I jumped from one idea to the next without making that clear.
Objective: Controlling Idea
​
This revision shows that I was more specific in my idea and worded it that so the reader knew exactly what to expect in the essay.
Advocacy Project
Advocacy Project Objectives
The advocacy project is built upon the HCP using the historical literature review to build a strong foundation for the argument and solution to a particular issue in animal science. The objectives of the project were to include a historical dimension on the issue at hand, state the problem at hand and ask related philosophical questions concerning the issue, and provide realistic and plausible solutions the problem identified while maintaning a scholarly tone, use a variety of convincing statistics, well-developed counterarguments and rebuttals, and incorporate a wide variety of multi-modal elements to supplement the project.
​
The Drafting Process
In the actual essay for the advocacy project, I had to cut down my HCP to about 3.5 pages. Doing this was very hard to do so because all my transitions embedded in my HCP had to be removed and rewritten so that it would connect to the advocacy part of the project, rather than review the literature. I focused on the objectives in order to help guide my writing process such as developing the ethical questions from the literature review, stating the problem, and coming up with solutions while sprinkling th counterargument throughout the essay.
In the first draft, I focused on managing the HCP into a more readable piece of work that was shorter than the original draft. The first draft only consisted of a maximum of about six pages, where the focus was on narrowing down the literature review and introducing a philosophical question that would provide a mind-provoking discussion of whether it is morally right t neglect the intelligence of pigs and continue to use them for human consumption.
In the second draft, I placed more attention on coming up with solutions supplemented by facts and statistics to further strengthen my proposals. I used soruces from the Humane Society and famous researchers such as Temple Grandin to make a convincing case for the solutions. I introduced multi-modal elemnts that woud clearly illustrate the predicaments that pigs went through such as gestation crates.
​
​
Click below to view my drafts!
Revision Strategy
​
After the first draft, I knew I needed some serious revising. I needed to expand my historical literature review to fully focus on all the aspects that problem focused on, such as registering and remembering the suffering, and propose more solutions that were specific and that were back up with professional sources that were quite plausible. When I got to the final proofreading state, I decided to entirely rewrite the problem and solution in order to advocate the point that pig farming is unsustainable and causes a huge onset of problems that often not thought about. This required engagement in the research that I was doing because I needed to connect interdisplinary concepts across the board.
Proof of Revision
Revision #1:
Objective: A Scholarly Appeal to Logos/Ethos
Originally in the first draft, I attempted to use the controversia speaker Yourofsky to make a statement that eating meat was actually eating the cooked parts of an animal's limbsin a manner that was captivating and was sure to hook a reader's attention. However, since his original statement was too gruesome and inappropriate for a scholarly essay, I put his quote into my own words and phrased it in a more formal tone.
Revision #2:
Objective: A Captivating, Fact-Driven Introduction
The first draft did not originally contain an introduction paragraph. This is particularly important part of the writing rocess because writing an introduction was what gave the paper a hook an a hint as to what the essay was going to about. Adding statistics about pig slaughter also provided some foreshadow as to what the project was going to be about.
​
