Sunday, October 28, 2007

TA: Revising the introduction again

For this weeks TA, I thought I could show how I changed my first paragraph to provide a more fitting introduction for my research paper A. The blog has a 400 word maximum limit, so in order to meet that, I have omitted portions of the introduction. The first draft is pasted:

On August 28, 2007, it was reported that Utah—out of all the fifty-one competitors including Washington D.C.—had taken first place; Utah is apparently not home to the highest percentage of overweight youth, but rather the breeding ground for the lowest percentage of heavy teens ... Rather, if Utah wishes to continue its nation-low statistics, or even prevent any further cases of student obesity, limiting competitive foods is a misled step toward its battle against obesity

The italicized parts are primarily where I think the problems lie. The first sentence is put into a passive voice, forcing the reader to question, “Who reported Utah?” Although I explain this later in the paper, it might be unsettling to the reader at only the introduction. For my revision, I decided to remove the passive voice and present in the beginning who is reporting—TFAH.
The next revision comes at the end of the paragraph. During the Peer Review, the reviewer noted that the last sentence might be too strong for the introduction. She meant that I was revealing too much about my argument before moving onto my paper. Now as we learned in class, this can be bad for some audiences. I'd like to oppose the idea claiming that my audience would keep reading despite the strong statement (the Utah State Board of Education) because they haven’t made an opinion on this item yet—and thus read my research. To please both parties, I left the sentence preceding the last underlined sentence in order to still show that I’m opposed to limiting competitive foods, but also removed the last sentence in my original introduction entirely and pasted it later on in the paper. Here is the new introduction:

On August 28, 2007, the Trust of America's Health organization (TFAH) reported that Utah—out of all the fifty-one competitors including Washington D.C.—had taken first place… With new information brought to the public ear, education reform policymakers need to be aware that this uninformed argument to regulate and limit competitive foods has been heading in the wrong direction.

And there it is, the new introduction.

No comments: