Cynthia Griffin

Eng 142
Professor Blazer
December 16, 2021

Project 5
Part 1
Each piece of writing is informative and balanced, trying to flow between
exposition/commentary and research. This balance was best seen in Project 4 when I switched
between addressing case studies and referencing personal experiences I had in my life that led
me to caring about the topic of children with disabilities. The organization of each piece is
decent, the reader being able to follow what is being presented to them, which was best seen in
Project 4 overall. The flow between each paragraph and sentence was clean and connected to
one another in a way that made it easy for the audience to follow. Being able to identify and
write to a specific audience has immensely improved my writing and helped me more clearly
organize my thoughts in relation to how my audience is going to receive it. For instance, in my
research paper, keeping in mind that I was writing to the parents of children with disabilities
made me have to rethink how much scientific information I was including in the piece because it
may be confusing to my audience. Having a better writing process, starting with an outline,
moving into a draft, then editing that draft into a final piece of work has also been an immense
help in the results of my pieces. My most thorough prepping, outlining, and drafting was done in
Project 3 because of the amount of information I was going to include and it ultimately made the
final product much more clear.

Making ideas clear within a piece of writing. It may have all the right pieces of
information but if it is not organized in a concise manner then the audience won’t be able to
comprehend the writing, even if it is composed of a lot of good information. This was seen in
Project 4 when I did the reverse outline to help edit my paper and ended up realizing that certain
paragraphs needed to be in a different order if they were going to flow properly. Having the flow
of the writing be organized and making sure the ideas line up from paragraph to paragraph is
also something that I need more work on, but again, the reverse outline is something that
helped me see those issues and will definitely be utilized in future writing.

I’ve definitely learned that I enjoy being organized with my writing, but that I also benefit
from just writing out everything that I need to and then rearranging things during the editing
process. It definitely depends which type of piece I’m writing; for instance, in the research paper
I made a detailed outline of how I wanted to organize my ideas and sources. However, in the
advocacy letter, I made a much more loose outline and just wrote out everything I wanted to.
Then, during the editing process, I reorganized the paragraphs and made everything flow
together cleaner.
 The different editing techniques that I learned during this semester--including separating
paragraphs into sentences to more clearly see if they connect to each other and writing out a
topic sentence for each paragraph so make sure everything flows from one idea to the next--are
definitely what I want to bring with me for future pieces. Also, deciding on a specific audience for
each piece of writing is something else I will continue to do on future projects. Considering who
you are specifically writing to is something I’ve realized is essential to the writing process as it
completely changes how you convey information.

Below is an excerpt from Project 3 that was too dense in information and didn’t come to a clear
point, making it confusing for the audience. I’ve provided the original excerpt as well as my
edited down version that is more concise:

Before: “Many studies have been done within the scientific field regarding these questions on
multilingualism’s effect on children with autism. One of the more recent studies published in
2020 by Ms.Sendhilnathan and Professor Chengappa delves into the effects of language
intervention in English on the cognitive, social communication, and social skills of children with
autism, both monolingual and bilingual. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing
Association (ASHA), the purpose of language intervention is “...to stimulate overall language
development and to teach language skills in an integrated fashion and in context, so as to
enhance everyday communication and ensure access to academic content”(American Speech,
para.2). Language intervention can be used in many contexts, but is often used as a type of
therapy for children with developmental disabilities. It’s done through interacting with the child
by playing and talking, often using activities like reading, showing pictures, using toys, or
ongoing events to stimulate language development (Harnett, J.K., 2019). It’s done in the
dominant language of the participants to stimulate language development, therefore allowing it
to be used with both monolingual and bilingual children. In Sendhilnathan and Chengappa’s
study, they use language intervention in English on two groups of participants--one being
bilingual and one being monolingual--to observe the direct effects of language intervention on
the communication and language development of both groups. The participants were all recruited
through the Early Intervention Programmes for Infants and Children (EIPIC) at Cerebral Palsy
Alliance Singapore (CPAS) and are age-matched across both groups to ensure the most accurate
comparisons of the data.” (p.3)

After: ““Many studies have been done within the scientific field regarding these questions on
multilingualism’s effect on children with autism. One of the more recent studies published in
2020 delves into the effects of language intervention in English on the cognitive, social
communication, and social skills of children with autism, both monolingual and bilingual.
According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the purpose of
language intervention is “...to stimulate overall language development and to teach language
skills in an integrated fashion and in context, so as to enhance everyday communication and
ensure access to academic content”(para.2). Language intervention can be used in many
contexts, but is often used as a type of therapy for children with developmental disabilities. It’s
done through interacting with the child by playing and talking, often using activities like reading,
showing pictures, using toys, or ongoing events to stimulate language development (Harnett,
J.K., 2019). It’s done in the dominant language of the participants to stimulate language
development, therefore allowing it to be used with both monolingual and bilingual children. In
Sendhilnathan and Chengappa’s study, they use language intervention in English on two groups
of participants--one being bilingual and one being monolingual--to observe the direct effects of
language intervention on the communication and language development of both groups. The
results of this study showed that there was no difference in the learning speed between
monolingual and bilingual children with disabilities.”

Part 2
There is a variety of writing that will have to be done within the field of forensic art. If I am an
independent forensic artist that has to find work I would need to be able to reach out
professionally to various police departments to see if my services are needed. While working
with victims of crimes in an interviewing fashion I will have to be empathetic and my speech but
concise in my listening and documentation of what they tell me to make sure I am able to
accurately describe the person we are looking for. I will also have to write up reports on what
happened during the interviewing process and potentially present my work as evidence in a
court of law.

Due to the vast array of responsibilities I will have, the variety of writing that was done this
semester will most definitely assist me in my future career. The thoroughness and information
put into the research paper, the insight and empathy that went into the advocacy letter, the deep
analysis that went into the annotated bibliography; all of this writing will help me in my future
career as a forensic artist.