Blog Post 11

I am going to do the 3rd option and address the topic of stress and exercise therapy an effective stress management tool (such as qi gong). I will narrow my topic by addressing the effects of stress and exploring one tool that would be helpful in combating stress. My target audience is LDS people. The argument will be specifically targeted to my LDS audience by using statistics targeting the LDS people and cultural traditions that accelerate the need for greater stress management. My concerns is how do I integrate my opinions into the research data? 

Blog Post 11

For my issues paper, I have decided to work with option 2. I plan to narrow my topic by specifying one of the many influences in the world that can cause youth members of churches to abandon their religion. I plan to focus solely on the teaching methods churches use to teach their youth and observe how the youth think about those teaching methods themselves. The target audience I plan to address in my issues paper are probably church leaders who are currently suffering through this increasing trend of the youth leaving their churches. The way I plan to create an argument targeting this audience is by explaining the flaws and weaknesses they use when teaching their youth. However, for this research paper, I have problems with the commentary as in trying to explain the effectiveness of the concrete details I add to my paper.

blog 11

Olivia and I chose to write about the second topic- the issue of why young adults are leaving church.  We decided to focus on the influences that media have on youth and young adults and how it affects their religious values.  Because media is such an extensive topic, it was quite the task deciding how to narrow it.  After a lot of discussing, we decided to focus on four elements of media: pornography, television and movies, music, and the emphasis of spirituality over being religious.  One concern of ours is that our topics may still be too broad, so we are trying to really focus and be specific in our paragraphs.  Our audience is the inter-denominational council of American religions and we are explaining our thoughts on why we believe media has led the young adults away from religious affiliations.  Because our audience is not exclusively LDS church members, it is important that we remember that we use language or phrases that not only LDS members understand, but that other religions would understand as well.  Another concern that we have is how to reference a personal experience while keeping the paper formal.  Because it was a personal experience, we were uncertain as to whether we are allowed to say words such as “I” and “we” when explaining the personal experience.  Just to be safe, we changed the story to be a true story, but did not mention that we personally knew the person; we just alluded to it.  This paper has been really interesting to write and we are excited to learn more as we start to finish our paper!

blog

How will I narrow my Issues Paper? Well, I think my topic is narrow enough as it is. If anything I need to expand my topic a little bit. It’s a bit difficult on the research side of this topic. But then again the things that are worth researching aren’t going to be easily discovered. I’m torn between writing a time consuming, difficult paper that I will care about and doing an easier topic for the grade. I’m here at BYU to learn so I should probably do the one that is more interesting to me. However, this assignment is not completely isolated. It is competing for my time with five other classes. Maybe I could learn more by spending more of my time on another class.  It’s a delicate balance… But topics though, yeah, topics. I’ll narrow it or expand it in some way. I was thinking that since my topic has to do with governmental policies, I should probably write to legislators. However, nowadays it seems to work better if you just make some noise on the Internet. If that is the route that I choose to take I guess the audience would be to the people on change.org. That is less specific though, and would be more difficult for this assignment so I guess I’ll just write it to a legislator. I can specifically craft my argument to a specific person. Maybe I can pick to my senator or something. That way I can cater my argument to their political views.

Something about Central America

     When I began brainstorming for my topic idea I knew I wanted to include Central America in whatever I'd be talking about. Fearing there was not enough information out there to write an 8-10 page paper I started with a pretty broad topic.. maybe a little too broad. My question was something along the line of how history and geography has played a part in the development of Central America. I realized, after being told by both the library assistant and yourself that I needed to narrow my topic. I have narrowed it down to focusing on the country of Costa Rica and have changed my thesis completely. Now, I will be talking about the violence in Costa Rica, the US ties to CR, and what we can do to help, if anything.
   My target audience will be those high enough up to help make the decision, what, if anything, should be done. I think that I'll just use a few comparisons, statistics, facts, and just an emotional appeal to help them see why and what can possibly be done.
   Well, ya see, I still have a ton of concerns. I just fear that I am not as well prepared for this writing assignment, not to mention it's the largest writing assignment I've had to do. Writing has never been my strong point but I look forward to finishing it and just being done.

Obesity Epidemic

When I first picked my topic for this Issues Paper, it was a fairly wide research question and I honestly didn't know which direction I was going to take. My original question was "How has obesity become a worldwide issue?" I am really interested in health and healthy living and this was something that I really wanted to research about, but than my next problem was how to narrow it down. I looked at a few different directions, but it came down to "How has the American culture of eating a lot of fast food and not exercising very much affected other countries, specifically third world countries such as Mexico and Samoa?" Although finding information is a lot harder when your question is more narrow, it is also a lot easier because you can find more specific information instead of having to sift through a huge long article. I plan on writing this paper to people who are not really informed about the complications of obesity as well as those who are interested in learning more about the prevention of obesity. I will relate to my audience by giving real life examples hopefully and using the correct rhetoric to draw them in. I'm a little bit nervous at this point about being able to write enough, but that fear is fueled by my lack of writing juices that I've had flowing in my brain lately. Something about that nice spring weather makes writing papers a lot more difficult.

Just Another Day of Blog Writing

Tommy and I actually started with our topic too narrow and we have now expanded it to cover a few more arguments considering why young adults are leaving the church. At first, we were just gonna go with pornography and how members of religious organizations are falling under its evil power but then we decided pornography is one of the reasons why the views of the church and the views of the world are growing further apart. So with that broader topic we can discuss more of why young adults are leaving the church and then offer up our solution. So our argument is pretty well developed now but we still need help figuring out how to implement more sources and have more analysis. Our 4 pager was pretty good so I think we're definitely on the right track. Since we are doing option 2, our audience is church clergy from around the world. Singe the argument has very diverse beliefs there may be few things we agree on but all churches are losing young adults because of our reason and every major religion has strong morals that members are expected to follow. So, as long as we connect to the audience on a moral basis and respect the divine power that all religions have, it should be a very well crafted essay.

The Clever Title I Wish I Had

First Step. So, I have a feeling that I may have narrowed my topic a little bit toooooo much, but we shall see how it goes. First I started out with the question, "How does modern parenting affect youth leaving churches in America?" I started researching this topic. I honestly wasn't sure how to do that, but somehow I did. And somehow I ended up discovering that a huge reason why youth leave church is because of involvement with drugs and or alcohol.

Second Step. How was I going to make this relevant? How was I going to make this a current? And how was I going to narrow it down? I started to think of my friends and reasons why some of them fell away from their religious beliefs and I thought...drugs. Okay my answer was confirmed. Then I asked, "What drug?" My mind said, "Marijuana." BOOM. There was my answer.
The legalization of marijuana is such a big issue right now, I would surely be able to find current evidence to support my argument that The legalization and current trending use of marijuana is the reason why youth are leaving churches around America.

My audience is leaders of different religious denominations around America. I decided to try and include most of the bigger more popular religions in my audience. I want to address them by talking about the Big Three in my paper: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. When doing this I want to connect to that group specifically by using appropriate jargon and rhetoric.

I don't think I have any questions... mostly because I have so many if I tried to ask them I would just barf words all over the page, soooo ya.

THE END

Post 11

Before Grant and I were partners, I had narrowed my topic to parents and their effect on youth in religion. After talking to Grant though, we decided to combine our topics. So now we have decided to take our paper down to the social issue of gay marriage and its effect on youth today. With this said, we are still incorporating parenting into the paper. We are doing this by addressing what parents can do to prepare kids when they encounter these social issues and others who may oppose their beliefs. Our target audience are the stakeholders and other Christian leaders. We are crafting our argument to target our audience by making sure that we don't tell them things that they already know and by trying to inform them so that they can effectively change what they are doing to better include youth. Some lingering concerns just include how much we should involve this audience and how much scholarly research we can actually find. It gets hard with this topic because most things that I have found are just small articles with people's opinions on why youth leave the church. I really have to work hard to include valuable research that isn't redundant. Another concern is just trying to give meaningful insight without getting redundant as well. When speaking about religion like this, you could honestly sum in up in a paragraph. So it takes a lot of research and thought to inform the audience. All together though this has been an interesting topic to learn about though!

Issues Paper Topic

Narrowing my topic choice for the issues paper was fairly easy for me--mainly because i chose a narrow topic to begin with. I'm really interested in racism (that sounds so dark, haha) and why it happens. I had heard about a specific news event happening in France and was instantly interested in it, just in time for the issues paper to come up. With this topic of racism in France, addressing a target audience of Americans will be tricky. Basically what i plan on doing is discussing the history behind the anti-Semitic feelings in France and how similar feelings towards the Muslim culture is seen in our own country. My main concern is being able to bring awareness and address the American side to it, while still staying true to my research topic question.

narrowing my issue

I believe I have narrowed my topic well enough. I have made my paper a proposition for a new plan to expand the NFL and I am concentration on how they NFL will benefit the new countries or cities involved. I talk a lot on the economic side of it because that is what all cities look for in a team. I show how the team alone helps improve the economic and how the NFL as an organization makes sure that the city stays afloat. I make sure that it is apparent that the attention that football gets will benefit any city. I then expand the economic impact to the super bowl and show how a new team will be able to feel that affect in its future. At the moment I am on the 7^th page of my essay and trying to decide if I will include how the team will effect a city socially and psychologically. I thought the paper was suppose to be at least 10 pages but now I know it is 8-10, so maybe I wont go into much depth in that topic. I will thou address counters on the economics of a team. So overall my paper has been narrowed to the economic effect of a team on the host city and I feel that that is the most effective argument there is on this issue. Again money drives everything. I was going to have my audience be the commissioner Goodell himself but then I figured he would already know and understand most of my case so it would be redundant to him. So I have made it to football fans and the cities. I feel it will still be narrow enough and I feel that if a major of a city read my proposition that he will be persuaded to want a team.

11

I narrowed my topic down so that it discusses the ineffectiveness of CARSI towards Central America.  This is narrowed down from just the drug trade in general in Central America.  My target audience I chose for my issues paper was the United States government and United States policy makers.  Basically in my issues paper I am discussing each point of CARSI and how it has basically failed at producing results in Central America and so I am crafting my argument around how policy makers need to make a change to more effectively reduce drug trafficking and violence in Central America.  The biggest problem I have encountered is supporting my claims with enough evidence, which has been a recurring problem on all my other papers I've written this semester.  Also I am a little concerned with actually coming up with some good suggestions on how US policy makers could revise or alter the CARSI initiative.

Blog post 11

I started my issues paper at first planning on talking about preserving African languages in general, but realized that was too broad (with Kelsey's suggestion too) so I decided to focus specifically on Zulu. It is a narrow topic but I still have a lot of things to say. I have just over 4 pages so far and still have other ideas for things to include in the paper so I don't think I'll have a problem reaching the page requirement.  I have already included one major example of a language that died out, and I plan on adding one, maybe two more.
My target audience are average Americans who don't know a lot about this issue, so I can give a good amount of background information and things like that to make it clear. This is a difficult topic to relate to Americans because a lot of them haven't even heard of Zulu before. It will be hard to get them interested in this issue but I think through telling stories of other lost languages I may be able to make it interesting. I'm also going to mention several ideas of how we can preserve the Zulu language and hopefully I can find something that an average American can do to help. I still kind of worry about my paper being professional enough, that I'll be able to use enough sources and find a way to have them support my paper, rather than feeling like I just threw in sources because it's a requirement.

Issues Paper

Topic selection has been the death of me this semester. I am not used to picking my own topic ever. It has always been a prompt given. Now, this doesn't necessarily make the prompt exciting or interesting to me, but it at least gives me a narrow, specific topic to write about which I have recently learned is a lot less stressful than trying to form your own topic. However, with this issues paper I have found it very helpful to follow the instruction given in class about having a few questions at the beginning of something you may want to write about. I have found that as I have researched answers to the questions that I would like to answer, I have been able to more narrowly define my topic. My topic is how social issues like gay marriage and church's trying to provide the "cool" factor in their services is fueling the withdrawal among young adults from their religion. This is my topic now. When I started, I was looking for answers about abortion, pornography and a lot of other factors but as I researched, it was naturally narrowed down to what it is now. The audience is the religious council and I intend to not only address the issue of same-sex marriage, but how this religious council can help retain the young adults by providing doctrine and application instead of bands and pizza parties. Other concerns I have  are just how to effectively address the council and then just making sure the information flows.

Blog Post #11-Issues Paper

Blog Post #11

Alexis and I are doing a lot to narrow our topic. Reasons for why young people leave church is a very broad topic! There are countless reasons why young people leave religious affiliations. We decided to narrow our paper to media and pop-culture and the effect that it has on youth and the decisions that they make. Media is also a broad topic so we are going to narrow it even more and write paragraphs more specifically on pornography, music, movies and television shows and also the trends of pop-culture and Hollywood. We have found that religion isn’t very “popular” in our culture. Many celebrities tend to consider themselves spiritual rather than religious. Very few people in the limelight believe in God and are open about their religious beliefs. Our target audience is ecclesiastical leaders and preachers who are wondering how they can stop this from happening. How can they keep their youth involved in religion? I have a few concerns about my research. I really want to make sure I am using the best possible sources with the best information. Sometimes I worry that the information I use will be irrelevant. I hope to stay organized by linking all of the research together to create a good argument. We need to think of more solutions, but one of ours is that they should talk to their youth about recommended media and entertainment standards. Most of the time the youth just go along with what is popular, they don’t understand the negative influence it can have on their choices and attitudes.