Hunter Brown's Rhetoric Blog

Do GMOs have an adverse effect on human health and the ecosystem? As the world food market gains traction worldwide, each country is looking for ways to increase the production of their crop and make it better for the consumer. With advances in the bio sciences, some crops are being considered as genetically modified organisms (GMO). GMOs improve the quality of the product by splicing the genetic information of a specific organism with the crop itself. This is done to improve taste, nutrition, and defense against pests. Some people believe that introducing new information to a species's genome might accidentally create negative results that will harm people consuming the crop. This topic is important because the US government does not have regulation to label GMO food product. If GMOs have a measurable negative effect on humans, then consumers are put at risk of not knowing what they are putting in their bodies. In addition, there is a vested interest in improving the quality of...

Writing Analysis: Scientific Writing in the Biological Sciences Introduction             Biology is the natural science that studies life, how other organisms interact with each other, how organisms are structured, functions, and behave.  Modern biology has become an eclectic field, from animal behavior and mechanosensation to genetics and biochemistry, there are plenty of things to write about as a researcher.  Specifically, I will be focusing on my field of interest: research genetics.  Twelve years after the Human Genome Project, researchers are hard at work discovering and documenting how the nucleic bases that code who we are affects our physic, mental pathways, even down to whether we like cilantro on our burritos or not.  I have interviewed Dr.  Kevin Christie, Post-doctoral at the Eberl Fly Lab and Assistant in Instructing at the University of Iowa, to discuss h...

Psychology Strengths: Interviews had good information Aside from lack of headings, the paper was organized Weaknesses: Too many quotations when they could have paraphrased Did not introduce a source, thrown it in the middle of paper Formatting: no headers, title page, lacking punctuation. Grade: D- Economics Strengths: Proper formatting Proper in-text citations Great job comparing academic and non-academic Well organized Weaknesses: Lists were wordy and had a lot of and's Did not mention an interview Lacking sub-headings to divide major headings Grade: B+ Engineering Strengths: Great use of examples, analyzed them well Compared non-academic and academic papers in same heading Good length, plenty of references Weaknesses: (Sinha, Bullock, Hendrickson, Levinson, Lyles, Radwan, Li, 2002) should be (Sinha, et al. 2002) Grade: A- Business Strengths: Best formatting: Major headers, sub-headers Very good use of examples, they explained the use of th...

My interview took place at the Eberl Lab, Biology Building with Dr. Kevin Christie, an Assistant in Instruction for the Department of Biology and has written four published papers in the span of eight years. We discussed about his writing habits, who he writes to, what he has learned about writing in the Biology field, and how his profession writes research papers that can be published. What distinguishes scientific writing from the humanities is the impersonal, informational tone that homogenizes even the most artistic writer. Scientists who's career depends on writing about new findings and facts about how the world works focus solely on talking about the findings and data rather than the art of writing itself. Of course, it is important to have a flow of writing that makes sense to an informed reader in that field. This is why Kevin combines sentences to have as much utility out of his words and maintain a consistent flow of technical terms. Peer reviews are a necessity and what...

Noise-Induced Hearing Loss: New Animal Models https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289668/pdf/nihms-628892.pdf This is a published research article co-authored by Kevin and my research professor, Dr. Daniel Eberl. This article compares and contrasts the hearing characteristics of Drosophila and C. elegans and offers ways to use these organisms to represent noise induced hearing loss in humans. I know Kevin has written the introduction and the section about C. elegans and Dan wrote the Drosophila  section. This way, I can compare the writing styles of both researchers to show the homogeneity of writing in STEM fields. A fly's hearing https://now.uiowa.edu/2013/09/flys-hearing This is a nonacademic news article run by Iowa Now five years ago. Here the reporters interview Kevin and Dan about their recent article "Noise-Induced Hearing Loss: New Animal Models". As you read the article, you will see the writers condense the research article into a piece that i...