Unit Two: Health and Happiness in the Modern World

Major Skills: avoiding plagiarism; paraphrasing, quoting, summarizing; source introduction/integration and citation; audience analysis; writing a persuasive discussion; development in relation to readers’ needs; English prose style (adapting writing style/tone to a particular audience)

In Unit Two, we will discuss and write about how the modern world impacts our health and happiness: constantly updated technology, fast-paced lifestyle, packed schedules, work demands, changing family structures, changing diet, excessive materialism . . .

First consider this question: What defines the “modern world”? Then ask yourself: What do we need for health and happiness? Then consider whether the modern world provides what we need for health and happiness. Personally, I think that we are losing some of the necessary ingredients for a truly happy and healthful life; but I also see that we have gained the potential for more and more human happiness and better and better human health. Thus I think that we need to make careful choices about how we live in this modern world. Do you think that we should resist some aspects of modernity? Do you think that we need to embrace (accept, welcome) modernity and learn to integrate it into our lives in a beneficial way?

Summary of an Article

Write a summary of the article “How to ‘Thrive’: Dan Buettner’s Secrets of Happiness.”Condense the article’s discussion into a concise and precise résumé of its most important ideas; express the ideas in your own phrases, not the author’s. Follow the Summary Guidelines in this textbook. The summary should be about 3/4 of a page. Be sure not to plagiarize the author’s sentences or phrases. You may use only one quotation in your summary.

Essay: Persuading a Reader

Write an essay (4-5 pages) persuading your reader of the need to change their behavior in some way in order to live well in the modern world. You may focus on any aspect of modern life that interests you and that you think is relevant to health and happiness. You will write your essay to a specific audience. You must identify both your audience and your role for the essay; type these at the top of your essay, below the date (e.g., audience: parents; role: medical student).

You will express your focus and intention in a clear, precise, strong thesis statement. Your thesis should say very precisely what you want your readers to do.

The essay must have at least four sub-points. You may integrate your summary into your essay if you want to. You must use at least one other source in your essay. Be sure to introduce your source(s):

According to ------------ in “---------------------,”

As -------------- points out in “-------------------,”

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Use persuasive strategies in your essay: appropriate development/support, appropriate/powerful language, information that will impact your readers, appropriate tone of voice. Consider carefully whether you should use “we” or “you” or “they” to address your readers. Make sure that all your writing strategies are appropriate for your readers. Remember that information alone is not persuasive; persuasion requires consideration of readers’ needs, fears, interests, values.

Suggestions for Development

Audience: new immigrants to the USRole: experienced immigrant to the US

Thesis: We came to the US to find a better life, but we’re destroying our health and our families’ potential for success here if we give in to the incredibly fast-paced lifestyle here. Of course we need to work hard and get a college degree in order to succeed, but our rewards will be empty if we don’t maintain our health—and our family harmony—by getting a reasonable amount of sleep every night.

• intro: comparison to sleep habits in home country• information about the issue (e.g., how many people in the US suffer from a lack of sleep)• causes of the problem (e.g., why we don’t get enough sleep in the US; description of working

immigrants’ lifestyle in the US)• negative effects of the issue (e.g., physical, psychological, and mental effects of lack of sleep)• how to change (e.g., advice on how to arrange a better schedule)• good effects of changing (e.g., an emotional, non-factual description of the better life that is

possible)

Audience: young tech-savvy personRole: older generation who resist new technology

Thesis: It’s true that it’s hard to keep up with the constantly changing technology that permeates our lives now, and some of it may seem like nothing but useless toys that eat up our time and deplete our bank accounts. But if you learn how to control this technology, how to make it work for you, you’ll find that it actually makes your life easier and fuller—and you might have fun!

• intro: humorous description of the flood of new electronic products in our lives• audience’s perspective on the issue (e.g., why older generation won’t learn how to use it)• negative effects of ignoring the issue (e.g., what they’re losing if they continue to resist it)• benefits of adapting (e.g., an emotional, non-factual description of how new technology will

improve life)• how to adapt (e.g., advice on how to gradually become comfortable with new technology)

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How to “Thrive”: Dan Buettner's Secrets of Happiness

Writer and explorer Dan Buettner has spent his life traveling the world in search of answers. His early life consisted of trekking throughout the world on a bicycle, covering thousands of miles in Africa, Asia, South America and beyond. His travels around the world (and on assignment for National Geographic) inspired him to discover and name the globe's "blue zones," the countries and societies with the longest life expectancy, the greatest happiness and other strengths. His first book to come out of this research was 2008's The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest, a prescription for life extension that became an international best-seller.

Now, Buettner is back with a new book, Thrive, which focuses on happiness in the "blue zones," and how everyone can attain a better quality of life by following the happiest countries' examples. . . .

'A Place Where a Garbage Man Makes As Much As a Lawyer'

Buettner devotes a section of Thrive to Denmark, where the "gross national happiness" is incredibly high. When asked why this is, he notes that the country's leveling tax structure enables its citizens to have more freedom. "Normally when we think of happiness, we think of money and status, but Denmark teaches us the opposite lesson," he says. "There, you have a place where you are taxed to the mean. A cultural norm reminds everybody that they are no better than everybody else, so you're not going to choose your career path based on status. You're in a place where a garbage man makes as much as a lawyer. So what you have are 4 million people who excel at things like furniture design and architecture."

Buettner also notes that in Denmark, most people only work "37 hours a week on average, and they take their full six weeks of vacation," noting that a liberal work schedule leads to greater happiness overall.

He also traveled to Singapore for the book, finding that the citizens there responded well to the stringent law enforcement. "What you have here is a place that's very secure. Evolutionarily speaking, we are more hard-wired for security than freedom," he says. "So in Singapore, while you can't buy pornography, a woman can walk any street day or night and be completely secure that she's not going to be raped or mugged. And there's also tax laws in place that encourages people to stay closer to their aging parents. That way the elderly are taken care of and happier, and it turns out the way socialization works, we get more satisfaction retroactively socializing with our parents than anybody else."

'The Happiest People in America Socialize Seven Hours a Day'

In terms of translating the lessons from the "blue zones" to daily life, Buettner recommends that people "set up permanent nudges and defaults" in order to maximize happiness.

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"For example, in our financial lives, we know that financial security has a three-times greater impact on our happiness than just income alone," he says. "So setting up automatic savings plans, and buying insurance as opposed to buying a new thing. The newness effect of a new thing wears off in nine months to a year, but financial security can last a lifetime."

Buettner argues that relationships are really the key to lifelong happiness, noting that "the happiest people in America socialize about seven hours a day," and mentioning that "you're three times more likely to be happy if you are married ... and each new friend will boost your happiness about 10 percent." . . .

He also states how important good relationships can be in the workplace, adding that "the biggest determinant of whether or not you'll like your job is if you have a best friend there, more so than how much you're paid, so proactively make sure you have good friends there. One way I assert doing that is: Be the one who organizes happy hour."

'The Luster of Experience Can Actually Go Up with Time'

Finally, Buettner says that he has learned that people are happiest when they spend their time and money on experiences, as opposed to objects. He advises taking up an interest in sports or the arts, which will provide longer-term satisfaction than any one purchase. "The luster of an experience can actually go up with time," he says. "So learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language — those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come."

When asked about his own happiness level, Buettner admitted that he is incredibly content. After all, he has spent his life in the hot pursuit of adventure and helping others discover how to live longer and smile more. "I have always followed exactly what interests me and never really worried about the money," he says. "And when you think about it, to be able to travel the world ... on an expense account and do exactly what interests you, it just doesn't get much better than that."

“How to 'Thrive': Dan Buettner's Secrets of Happiness.” NPR. National Public Radio, 28 Nov. 2010. Web. 2 Jan. 2011.

Listen at:

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/24/131571885/how-to-thrive-dan-buettner-s-secrets-of-happiness&sc=nl&cc=es-20101205

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Can a Lack of Sleep Really Drive You Mad?by Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman

How long could you manage without sleep? The current record-holder is Randy Gardner, who as a 17-year-old Californian high-school student back in 1964 managed a staggering 265 hours—or 11 days—without so much as a nap.

"I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep," Gardner explained. In fact, by the time he finally broke the record, Gardner had endured crippling exhaustion, forgetfulness, dizziness, slurred speech and blurred vision. He'd been moody and irritable, and unable to concentrate on the simplest tasks. He'd even experienced hallucinations and delusions (on one occasion, for instance, imagining that he was the legendary San Diego Chargers' running back Paul Lowe). "We got halfway through the damn thing and I thought, ‘This is tough. I don't want to do this any more,'" Gardner recalled in 2006. "But everybody was looking at me so I couldn't quit."

Of course, you don't need to have made an attempt on Randy Gardner's record to know that lack of sleep can have some pretty unwelcome consequences. Anyone who has ever had to suffer a sleepless night will know just how disruptive it can be. The following day we're tired, irritable, a little miserable, and generally out of sorts. And the longer sleep problems go on, the more wretched we feel.

The consequences don't end there. It's long been known that people with psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, paranoia, bipolar disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) don't sleep well. Until recently, it was assumed their sleep difficulties were a product of the psychological problem. But research suggests that the process may also work in the opposite direction: persistent sleep problems may help cause and exacerbate a number of common mental illnesses.

The clinical definition of insomnia is taking longer than 30 minutes to fall asleep on several nights each week and over at least a month, which causes problems in daytime functioning. One recent Keele University study of more than 2,500 people in Staffordshire found that individuals with insomnia were nearly three times more likely to develop depression over the next 12 months and more than twice as likely to suffer from anxiety. And research in the US has suggested that people with breathing-related sleeping disorders such as sleep apnoea (in which breathing stops for a few seconds) are at greater risk of developing depression -- and the worse the sleep problem, the more likely it is that they'll become depressed.

Disturbed sleep is a well-known early sign of the manic episodes that characterise bipolar disorder (what used to be termed "manic depression"). Now there's evidence that these sleep problems aren't simply a symptom of the illness; they can also trigger the manic episodes.

A similar picture emerges from research we carried out recently at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London into the links between insomnia and paranoia. When we assessed 300 members of the general public, we found that those suffering from insomnia were five times more likely to experience strong paranoid thoughts than those who generally slept well. Part of

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the explanation for this startling statistic, we believe, is that insomnia is helping to cause paranoid thoughts, much as it can do for depression or anxiety.

The link between sleep problems and psychological problems isn't confined to adults. A |number of studies indicate that children who don't get enough sleep are prone to the sorts of behavioural problems that can look like the signs of ADHD. Earlier this year Finnish researchers published the results of a study of 280 seven- to eight-year-olds. The children who slept fewer than 7.7 hours a night were more prone to hyperactivity, restlessness, impulsiveness and lack of concentration.

Exactly why lack of sleep can have such a profound effect on our psychological and emotional well-being is a question that scientists are just beginning to tackle. But one key factor may be that when we don't get enough sleep, the part of the brain behind our foreheads that controls our thoughts, behaviours and emotions (the prefrontal lobe) doesn't function efficiently. Our rational mind, the executive centre that keeps us on an even keel, is overwhelmed by our feelings, no matter how negative.

. . . the message sent by this new research is that persistent sleep problems, once trivialised as merely a symptom by psychologists and psychiatrists, may actually play a key role in determining our mental health. If you can sort out your sleeping, you'll be reducing the risk of developing psychological and emotional problems. If you're already battling these problems, better sleep can be a crucial—and non-pharmaceutical—weapon in your armoury.

Happily, there are several tried-and-tested ways to combat sleeplessness. As a first step, exercise every day—it'll tire you out. Avoid caffeine, alcohol, or nicotine in the evening. Develop a relaxing evening routine--maybe take a warm bath or spend some time reading. Try listening to gentle music or doing a relaxation exercise. Have a bedtime snack, though go for something healthy and relatively plain.

Get your bedroom right for sleep -- that means a comfortable bed and a room that's quiet, dark, and your preferred temperature. Resist the temptation to lie in, and cut out daytime naps -- you'll only find it harder to fall asleep at night. Learn to associate your bed only with sleep, so don't use it, say, for reading, eating, watching TV, or writing a diary. (Sex is permissible, though.) Only go to bed when you're very tired and, if you're not asleep within 20 minutes, get up and do something relaxing for a while.

. . . We can all improve our sleep. And in so doing, we may also be helping to safeguard our mental health.

Daniel Freeman is a Wellcome Trust clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Jason Freeman is a writer and editor. They are the authors of Know Your Mind: Common Emotional and Psychological Problems and How to Overcome Them.

Freeman, Daniel, and Jason Freeman. “Can a Lack of Sleep Really Drive You Mad?” AlterNet. Independent Media Institute, 19 June 2009. Web. 23 June 2009.

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You Are Who You Eat Withby Katherine Gustafson

When the 10 Garcia-Prats boys got together every night for dinner, they shared more than food around the table. They talked about the successes and frustrations of their days. The older boys helped the younger ones cut their meat. They compared their picks for the World Cup, a conversation that turned into an impromptu geography lesson.

Their mother, Cathy, author of Good Families Don’t Just Happen: What We Learned from Raising Our Ten Sons and How It Can Work for You, strove to make the dinner table warm and welcoming, a place where her boys would want to linger. “Our philosophy is that dinnertime is not just a time to feed your body; it’s a time to feed your mind and your soul,” she told me over the phone from her Houston, Texas, home. “It lets us have an opportunity to share our day, be part of each others’ lives.”

Today, families like the Garcia-Prats are the exception. According the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health, fewer than half of Americans eat meals daily with their families, a statistic that highlights the breakneck pace at which we live and our grab-and-go food culture.

Increasing economic pressures only exacerbate these cultural trends, as many families are forced to work two jobs to afford the basics and have little time to slow down and have dinner.

Adults who prepare quality meals for children are offering something more important than a nutrition lesson: They are communicating that they care.

But the deterioration of the family meal may be more damaging than we realize. “Our lives have gotten so hectic and so busy that if you don’t set aside time as a family, I think you just get lost,” said Garcia-Prats. “Then you’re just individuals living in a building, instead of a family living in a home, supporting each other and being there for each other.”

Dinner and Happiness

When food advocate and chef Tom French asked a student how she felt after his organization, the Experience Food Project, began replacing the bland, processed food in her school cafeteria with fresh, healthy school lunches, he received an unexpected answer.

“She gave it some serious thought,” he told me over the phone. “Then she said, ‘you know, I feel respected.’”

Moments like this make French believe that adults who prepare quality meals for children are offering something more important than a nutrition lesson: They are communicating that they care. This is why the Experience Food Project teaches PTA parents about the importance of prioritizing family meals and helps them schedule the logistics of dinnertime.

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French says there are “mountains of statistical data” correlating family dinner with benefits such as better communication, higher academic performance, and improved eating habits. Having dinner together boosts family cohesiveness and is associated with children’s motivation in school, positive outlook, and avoidance of high-risk behaviors. Teens who frequently eat with their families are half as likely to smoke or use pot than those who rarely have family dinners, according to researchers at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA).

The correlation between family dinner and well-adjusted teens is so strong that CASA launched the first Family Day on September 27, an annual event honoring the family meal. The day recognizes that “parental engagement fostered during frequent family dinners is an effective tool to help keep America’s kids substance free.”

President Obama officially proclaimed Family Day 2010, noting that it served as an opportunity to “recommit to creating a solid foundation for the future health and happiness of all our nation’s children.”

Communities from all over the country held Family Day celebrations, and some made the event into a week-long affair. Families found creative ways to celebrate each others’ [sic] company over food—putting together homemade pizzas, picnicking, doing activities from CASA’s Family Dinner Kit, and eating at restaurants offering discounts for the occasion. 

Such events draw attention to the ways in which meals together help families strengthen their relationships, according to Joseph A. Califano Jr., CASA Founder and Chairman and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. “The more often teens have dinner with their parents, the more likely they are to report talking to their parents about what’s going on in their lives,” said Califano in a statement to press. “In today’s busy and overscheduled world, taking the time to come together for dinner really makes a difference in a child’s life.”

Family dinner also encourages the development of language skills and emotional intelligence in children. During dinner conversations, children learn how to articulate their feelings and experiences and to communicate respect—whether that means asking politely for a dish or talking about their day at school. Research shows that children who have acquired skills in identifying and expressing emotion and negotiating conflict often experience less distress, have fewer behavior problems, hold more positive attitudes about school, and exhibit better academic performance.

Fusion Cuisine

Finding ways to connect is increasingly important as families become more diverse and must negotiate cultural and generational difference. “People are tired and they are working and they are blending cultures and blending generations,” said French, who grew up in a household with his great-grandmother. 

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Families of all types benefit from sharing life’s daily ups and downs around the table. In a 2010 study of a group of racially diverse, low-income, urban youth, kids who ate family dinner more frequently had more positive perceptions of their communication with their parents. Extended and blended families may find that dinner solidifies fledgling or fragile bonds. And families that unite multiple cultures can make the sharing of specific traditions and dishes—which, as French puts it, “carry generations of cultural DNA”—into a centerpiece of family bonding.

As Garcia-Prats sees it, dinner is a time when families can celebrate their differences. “We learn diversity appreciation in our homes,” she said. “It’s going to be hard to appreciate someone else’s religion or ethnicity or culture if we haven’t even learned to appreciate the uniqueness of each person in our own family. It’s one of our philosophies: We are 12 unique individuals in this home.”

At dinner, we bridge the gaps between us by sharing our food and the stories of our lives. And the moments we spend together at the table form the basis of something remarkably profound. Call it what you will—sibling bonding, communicating respect, bridging cultures—but at the very least it is, as Garcia-Prats told me, ”not just about food.” It is about the way food can connect us.

Katherine Gustafson wrote this article for What Happy Families Know, the Winter 2011 issue of YES! Magazine. Katherine is a freelance writer and editor with a background in international nonprofit organizations. She is currently writing a book about sustainable food.

Gustafson, Katherine. “You Are Who You Eat With.” YES! Magazine. Positive Futures Network, 21 Nov. 2010. Web. 23 Dec. 2010.

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Vision—Homemade Prosperity: How to Get Out of the Consumer Trapby Shannon Hayes

It should have been a high point in my life. I had just successfully defended my dissertation and had three potential job opportunities. But I found myself pacing around our cabin or walking the hills of my family’s farm, alternately weeping and hurling invectives into the country air. Bob and I were fighting with a force I’d never seen.

The simple fact was, I didn’t want the job I’d spent years working toward.

“I thought you wanted this! Why the hell did you just spend the last four years at Cornell? Why did we just go through with this? Why did you say that’s what you wanted?”

What could I tell him? Because I didn’t know any other way to stay close to my family’s land and make the kind of money I thought we needed? Because I didn’t believe there was a future in farming? Because the only way I thought I could manifest my talents was within an institution that would offer me a paycheck?

“What do you want?”

“To write and farm.”

“Then do it.”

“We need money. I don’t know how to do it.”

But I did know how. Since our arrival on these shores, every generation of my family has farmed. I was in the first generation that didn’t believe we could make a living doing it. Our neighbors lived, laughed, and loved on these rocky hillsides, and they did it with four-figure incomes. And yet, I’d come to believe that, on these same hills, we needed six. Somewhere along the line, I had stopped believing the evidence that was before me and started believing one of the central myths of modern American culture: that a family requires a pile of money just to survive in some sort of comfort and that “his and her” dual careers were an improvement over times past.

What had changed? Why did I believe we needed so much? It was a puzzle to me at the time. In retrospect I see that my generation grew up immersed in media that equated affluence with respect, happiness, and fulfillment. We heard a national dialogue that predicted the end of the family farm. Those messages shook our security in our lifestyle—we ended up questioning our own experience.

After all, I grew up working on my neighbor’s farm. We had fantastic midday feasts, the house was warm in the winter, and there was always a little spare cash on hand to donate when someone was in trouble. And plenty of pies got baked, gratis, to contribute to the local church bake sale and turkey supper. I was in my mid-20s before I discovered just how little money they lived on.

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That was how many people lived as I was growing up in West Fulton, N.Y., where my family still farms. The steep hillsides and frosty valleys render most modern industrial farming technologies impractical in my community. Cash crops are few. To survive, my neighbors had to produce as many of the things they needed as possible and buy only the things they absolutely couldn’t make or grow at home. They grew and preserved food, sewed and mended clothes, and did their own repairs, improvements, and upkeep on the farm.

But most American lives reflect a transition that happened in households following the Industrial Revolution. Before then, the home was a center of production, not very different from the original households that first emerged in 13th-century Europe, as the feudal period was coming to an end. The family’s economic security was a result of the householders’ combined efforts to produce what they needed. They raised their food, cured their meats, made soap, wove fabric, and produced their own clothing.

Once the industrial revolution took hold, the household changed. Men were first to leave the home to work in factories, where they earned wages and used them to purchase the goods and services they were no longer home to produce. The more men worked outside the home, the more households had to buy in order to meet their needs.

For a time, women continued to produce from within the home, but factories eventually supplanted the housewives’ duties as well. As time wore on, domestic skills were no longer paramount for survival. Instead of cultivating skills to provide for our own needs, we pursued skills to produce for others’ needs in exchange for the money to buy what was once produced in the home. The household had changed from a center of production that supplied most of its own needs to a center of consumption that bought nearly everything it needed.

At first, there were some pretty great consumer items that, in all fairness, lightened a burdensome domestic labor load—automatic washing machines, for example. But the idea of buying labor-saving devices that can’t be made at home gradually turned into our modern consumer culture—where everything from bread to entertainment must be bought—and generated our national assumption that a middle-class family requires one or both spouses to make lots of money.

The families I grew up around were exceptions to the trend. The agricultural industrial revolution is a relatively newfangled phenomenon that really only took hold in the last 60 years. For a long time after most American households became centers of consumption, the family farm was still a center of production. The survival of the pre-industrialized farm was contingent partly on products grown for sale, but also on household production that reduced the need to buy things.Ultimately, Bob and I joined my parents in the grassfed meat business, where we now work, like many others, to help build a local, sustainable food system that enables us to make an adequate living. Keeping the lessons of our neighbors in mind, we determined that the key to survival was producing as much as we could and buying only what we must. We raise and sell meat for our income, but we also render fat into soap, preserve the summer harvest for winter, and spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors at home for entertainment than we do going out and spending money on amusements. Even with two children, we live very well on a bit more than $40,000 per year, a far cry from the six-figure income that I once thought we needed.

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Bob and I are fortunate in having access to my parents’ land and to the knowledge that they and other farmers in the area share with us. That has made our transition easier. But it doesn’t take a farm to begin the journey. Americans from different walks of life all around the country are taking steps in their own households, whether they are rural, urban, or suburban. Even without a land base, they are finding ways to turn their homes from units of consumption to units of production. They are walking and biking, rather than driving; cooking rather than going out for fast food; playing music and creating art rather than buying entertainment from mass media; preserving the harvest from local farms rather than buying packaged foods from an industrialized food system; brewing beer in the corner of their apartments; learning how to fix their own toilets and cars; repairing their clothing or finding ways to repurpose it; networking with neighbors to barter for goods and services that they cannot produce.

The upshot is a growing movement of Americans who are creating a new home economics where there is time for family members to enjoy each other, where the ecological footprint is greatly reduced, and where, instead of the family working to support the household, the household works to support the family. With this new home economy, relationships are deeper, children are more connected with the life systems that support them, and the family can make it through economic hard times with dignity and joy.

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for What Happy Families Know, the Winter 2011 issue of YES! Magazine. Shannon is the author of Radical Homemakers, The Farmer and the Grill, and The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook.  She works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in upstate New York and blogs at YES! Magazine .

Hayes, Shannon. “Vision—Homemade Prosperity: How to Get Out of the Consumer Trap.” AlterNet. Independent Media Institute, 17 Dec. 2010. Web. 17 Dec. 2010.

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Trauma: How We've Created a Nation Addicted toShopping, Work, Drugs and Sex

Post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed the conditions required for healthy childhood development. [In December 2010, Amy Goodman interviewed Dr. Gabor Maté] on Democracy Now! to talk . . . about ADD, as well as parenting, bullying, the education system, and how a litany of stresses on the family environment is leading to what he calls the "destruction of the American childhood."

DR. GABOR MATÉ: In the United States right now, there are three million children receiving stimulant medications for ADHD.

AMY GOODMAN: ADHD means?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And there are about half-a-million kids in this country receiving heavy-duty anti-psychotic medications, medications such as are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are getting it to control their behavior. So what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of children’s behavior, with no idea of the long-term consequences of these heavy-duty anti-psychotics on kids.

And I know that Canadians statistics just last week showed that within last five years, 43—there’s been a 43 percent increase in the rate of dispensing of stimulant prescriptions for ADD or ADHD, and most of these are going to boys. In other words, what we’re seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. And I should say, really, I’m talking about, more broadly speaking, what I would call the destruction of American childhood, because ADD is just a template, or it’s just an example of what’s going on. In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria or criteria for mental health disorders. So we’re talking about a massive impact on our children of something in our culture that’s just not being recognized.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what attention deficit disorder is, what attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, specifically ADD is a compound of three categorical set of symptoms. One has to do with poor impulse control. So, these children have difficulty controlling their impulses. When their brain tells them to do something, from the lower brain centers, there’s nothing up here in the cortex, which is where the executive functions are, which is where the functions are that are supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, those circuits just don’t work. So there’s poor impulse control. They act out. They behave aggressively. They speak out of turn. They say the wrong thing. Adults with ADD will shop compulsively, or impulsively, I should say, and, again, behave in impulsive fashion. So, poor impulse control.

But again, please notice that the impulse control problem is general amongst kids these days. In other words, it’s not just the kids diagnosed with ADD, but a lot of kids. And there’s a whole lot of new diagnoses now. And children are being diagnosed with all kinds of things. ADD is just

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one example. There’s a new diagnosis called oppositional defiant disorder, which again has to do with behaviors and poor impulse control, so that impulse control now has become a problem amongst children, in general, not just the specific ones diagnosed with ADD.

The second criteria for ADD is physical hyperactivity. So the part of the brain, again, that’s supposed to regulate physical activity and keep you still just, again, doesn’t work.

And then, finally, in the third criteria is poor attention skills—tuning out; not paying attention; mind being somewhere else; absent-mindedness; not being able to focus; beginning to work on something, five minutes later the mind goes somewhere else. So, kind of a mental restlessness and the lack of being still, lack of being focused, lack of being present. These are the three major criteria of ADD.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to this point that you just raised about the destruction of American childhood. What do you mean by that?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and troubled over the last several decades that the template for normal brain development is no longer present for many, many kids. And Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, who’s a professor of psychiatry at Boston—University of Boston, he actually says that the neglect or abuse of children is the number one public health concern in the United States. A recent study coming out of Notre Dame by a psychologist there has shown that the conditions for child development that hunter-gatherer societies provided for their children, which are the optimal conditions for development, are no longer present for our kids. And she says, actually, that the way we raise our children today in this country is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well-being in a moral sense.

So what’s really going on here now is that the developmental conditions for healthy childhood psychological and brain development are less and less available, so that the issue of ADD is only a small part of the general issue that children are no longer having the support for the way they need to develop.

As I made the point in my book about addiction, as well, the human brain does not develop on its own, does not develop according to a genetic program, depends very much on the environment. And the essential condition for the physiological development of these brain circuits that regulate human behavior, that give us empathy, that give us a social sense, that give us a connection with other people, that give us a connection with ourselves, that allows us to mature—the essential condition for those circuits, for their physiological development, is the presence of emotionally available, consistently available, non-stressed, attuned parenting caregivers.

Now, what do you have in a country where the average maternity leave is six weeks? These kids don’t have emotional caregivers available to them. What do you have in a country where poor women, nearly 50 percent of them, suffer from postpartum depression? And when a woman has postpartum depression, she can’t be attuned to the child.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about fathers?

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DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the situation with fathers is, is that increasingly—there was a study recently that showed an increasing number of men are having postpartum depression, as well. And the main role of the father, of course, would be to support the mother. But when people are—emotionally, because the cause of postpartum depression in the mother it is not intrinsic to the mother—not intrinsic to the mother.

What we have to understand here is that human beings are not discrete, individual entities, contrary to the free enterprise myth that people are competitive, individualistic, private entities. What people actually are are social creatures, very much dependent on one another and very much programmed to cooperate with one another when the circumstances are right. When that’s not available, if the support is not available for women, that’s when they get depressed. When the fathers are stressed, they’re not supporting the women in that really important, crucial bonding role in the beginning. In fact, they get stressed and depressed themselves.

The child’s brain development depends on the presence of non-stressed, emotionally available parents. In this country, that’s less and less available. Hence, you’ve got burgeoning rates of autism in this country. It’s going up like 20- or 30-fold in the last 30 or 40 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Say what you mean by autism.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, autism is a whole spectrum of disorders, but the essential quality of it is an emotional disconnect. These children are living in a mind of their own. They don’t respond appropriately to emotional cues. They withdraw. They act out in an aggressive and sometimes just unpredictable fashion. They don’t know how to—there’s no sense—there’s no clear sense of a emotional connection and just peace inside them.

And there’s many, many more kids in this country now, several-fold increase, 20-fold increase in the last 30 years. The rates of anxiety amongst children is increasing. The numbers of kids on antidepressant medications has increased tremendously. The number of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder has gone up. And then not to mention all the behavioral issues, the bullying that I’ve already mentioned, the precocious sexuality, the teenage pregnancies. There’s now a program, a so-called "reality show," that just focuses on teenage mothers.

You know, in other words—see, it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn’t the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how the drugs, Gabor Maté, affect the development of the brain.

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DR. GABOR MATÉ: In ADD, there’s an essential brain chemical, which is necessary for incentive and motivation, that seems to be lacking. That’s called dopamine. And dopamine is simply an essential life chemical. Without it, there’s no life. Mice in a laboratory who have no dopamine will starve themselves to death, because they have no incentive to eat. Even though they’re hungry, and even though their life is in danger, they will not eat, because there’s no motivation or incentive. So, partly, one way to look at ADD is a massive problem of motivation, because the dopamine is lacking in the brain. Now, the stimulant medications elevate dopamine levels, and these kids are now more motivated. They can focus and pay attention.

However, the assumption underneath giving these kids medications is that what we’re dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. And if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, and they’re normal when they’re with their mothers, and when you separate them from mothers, the dopamine levels go down within two or three days.

So, in other words, what we’re doing is we’re correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in a society and the loss of nurturing, non-stressed parenting, and we’re replacing that chemically. Now, the drugs—the stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are helped by it. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not; the problem is that 80 percent of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that’s all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it’s seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, but not as a problem of development.

AMY GOODMAN: Gabor Maté, you talk about acting out. What does acting out mean?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a great question. You see, when we hear the phrase "acting out," we usually mean that a kid is behaving badly, that a child is being obstreperous, oppositional, violent, bullying, rude. That’s because we don’t know how to speak English anymore. The phrase "acting out" means you’re portraying behavior that which you haven’t got the words to say in language. In a game of charades, you have to act out, because you’re not allowed to speak. If you landed in a country where nobody spoke your language and you were hungry, you would have to literally demonstrate your anger—sorry, your hunger, through behavior, pointing to your mouth or to your empty belly, because you don’t have the words.My point is that, yes, a lot of children are acting out, but it’s not bad behavior. It’s a representation of emotional losses and emotional lacks in their lives. And whether it’s, again, bullying or a whole set of other behaviors, what we’re dealing with here is childhood stunted emotional development—in some cases, stunted pain development. And rather than trying to control these behaviors through punishments, or even just exclusively through medications, we need to help these kids develop.

[. . .]

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about holding on to your kids, why parents need to matter more than peers.

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DR. GABOR MATÉ: Amy, in 1998, there was a book that was on the New York Times best book of the year and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize, and it was called The Nurture Assumption, in which this researcher argued that parents don’t make any difference anymore, because she looked at the—to the extent that Newsweek actually had a cover article that year entitled "Do Parents Matter?" Now, if you want to get the full stupidity of that question, you have to imagine a veterinarian magazine asking, "Does the mother cat make any difference?" or "Does the mother bear matter?" But the research showed that children are being more influenced now, in their tastes, in their attitudes, in their behaviors, by peers than by parents. This poor researcher concluded that this is somehow natural. And what she mistook was that what is the norm in North America, she actually thought that was natural and healthy. In fact, it isn’t.

So, our book, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, is about showing why it is true that children are being more influenced by other kids in these days than by their parents, but just what an aberration that is, and what a distortion it is of normal human development, because normal human development demands, as normal mammalian development demands, the presence of nurturing parents. [. . .]

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the importance of attachment?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: [Kids want to be with their peer group.] And now we’ve given kids the technology to do that with. So the terrible downside of the internet is that now kids are spending time with each other—

AMY GOODMAN: Not even in the presence of each other.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly the point, because, you see, that’s an attachment dynamic. One of the basic ways that people attach to each other is to want to be with the people that you want to connect with. So when kids spend time with each other, it’s not a behavior problem; it’s a sign that their relationships have been skewed towards the peer group. And that’s why it’s so difficult to peel them off their computers, because their desperation is to connect with the people that they’re trying to attach to. And that’s no longer us, as the adults, as the parents in their life.

AMY GOODMAN: So how do you change this dynamic?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, first we have to recognize its manifestations. And so, we have to recognize that whenever the child doesn’t look adults in the eye anymore, when the child wants to be always on the Skype or the cell phone or twittering or emailing or MSM messengering, you recognize it when the child becomes oppositional to adults. We tend to think that that’s a normal childhood phenomenon. It’s normal only to a certain degree.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, they have to rebel in order to separate later.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: No. They have to separate, but they don’t have to rebel. In other words, separation is a normal human—individuation is a normal human developmental stage. You have to become a separate, individual person. But it doesn’t mean you have to reject and be hostile to the values of the adults. As a matter of fact, in traditional societies, children would become

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adults by being initiated into the adult group by elders, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony or the initiation rituals of tribal cultures around the world. Now kids are initiated by other kids. And now you have the gang phenomenon, so that the teenage gang phenomenon is actually a misplaced initiation and orientation ritual, where kids are now rebelling against adult values. But it’s not because they’re bad kids, but because they’ve become disconnected from adults.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Maté, there’s a whole debate about education in the United States right now. How does this fit in?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, you have to ask, how do children learn? How do children learn? And learning is an attachment dynamic, as well. You learn when you want to be like somebody. So you copy them, so you learn from them. You learn when you’re curious. And you learn when you’re willing to try something, and if it doesn’t work, you try something else.

Now, here’s what happens. Caring about something and being curious about something and recognizing that something doesn’t work, you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable. Children who become peer-oriented—because the peer world is so dangerous and so fraught with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk, how does a child protect himself or herself from all that negativity in the peer world? Because children are not committed to each others’ unconditional loving acceptance. Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can’t do it. Those children become very insecure, and emotionally, to protect themselves, they shut down. They become hardened, so they become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It’s all about cool. It’s all about aggression and cool and no real emotion. Now, when that happens, curiosity goes, because curiosity is vulnerable, because you care about something and you’re admitting that you don’t know. You won’t try anything, because if you fail, again, your vulnerability is exposed. So, you’re not willing to have trial and error.

And in terms of who you’re learning from, as long as kids were attaching to adults, they were looking to the adults to be modeling themselves on, to learn from, and to get their cues from. Now, kids are still learning from the people they’re attached to, but now it’s other kids. So you have whole generations of kids that are looking to other kids now to be their main cue-givers. So teachers have an almost impossible problem on their hands. And unfortunately, in North America again, education is seen as a question of academic pedagogy, hence these terrible standardized tests. And the very teachers who work with the most difficult kids are the ones who are most penalized.

AMY GOODMAN: Because if they don’t have good test scores, standardized test scores, in their class—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: They’re seen as bad teachers.

AMY GOODMAN:—then they could be fired. They’re seen as bad teachers, which means they’re going to want to kick out any difficult kids.

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DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly it. The difficult kids are kicked out, and teachers will be afraid to go into neighborhoods where, because of troubled family relationships, the kids are having difficulties, the kids are peer-oriented, the kids are not looking to the teachers. And this is seen as a reflection. So, actually, teachers are being slandered right now. Teachers are being slandered now because of the failure of the American society to produce the right environment for childhood development.

AMY GOODMAN: Because of the destruction of American childhood.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s right. What the problem reflects is the loss of the community and the neighborhood. We have to recreate that. So, the schools have to become not just places of pedagogy, but places of emotional connection. The teachers should be in the emotional connection game before they attempt to be in the pedagogy game.

“Trauma: How We’ve Created a Nation Addicted to Shopping, Works, Drugs, and Sex.” AlterNet. Independent Media Institute, 26 Dec. 2011. Web. 26 Dec. 2011.

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Plagiarism StatementPlagiarism is an extremely serious offense against academic honesty policies. Plagiarism means to use someone else’s work and to claim it as your own. Plagiarism includes:

• turning in another student’s assignment (essay or paragraph) with your name on it• copying phrases, sentences, or paragraphs from printed sources• copying phrases, sentences, or paragraphs from internet sources• copying whole essays from the internet• asking a friend to write your assignment for you• asking someone to rewrite your assignment for you to correct the errors. (Getting someone to

help you with your assignment is OK, but you must work with that person: Sit beside him or her and discuss the corrections. Never just give someone your assignment and ask them to correct it and send it back to you.)

• taking the main idea of your essay (thesis, basic argument) from a source or another person• taking sub-points in your essay (supporting arguments) from a source or another person

College-level academic work, especially in the US, demands individual creativity and individual intellectual effort. In the commercial world, plagiarism is a violation of copyright laws, and it is punished by fines determined in court. In the academic world, plagiarism is a violation of academic honesty values, and it is punished by the teacher and the school according to the extent of the plagiarism:

• a lowered grade if the plagiarism is minimal• a grade of F if the plagiarism is extensive• a grade of 0 if the assignment is entirely or almost entirely plagiarized• being expelled from the school if the plagiarism is repeated or if it is committed at a higher

level (university, especially graduate school)

Parkland College has a plagiarism policy included in the Student Policy and Procedures Manual. Teachers at Parkland are expected to give the names of plagiarizing students to the Vice President of Academic Services. As the Manual states:

In cases where three or more incident reports have been filed with the vice president’s office, the student will be charged with an alleged violation of the Student Conduct Code, specifically Acts of Dishonesty. Conduct Code violations will follow the process as outlined in the Student Conduct Code. The Office of the Vice President of Academic Services may direct the judicial officer to impose the sanction of written warning, conduct probation, or restitution.  

In the event that a more serious sanction is recommended by the Office of the Vice President for Academic Services, a Student Discipline Hearing Committee will be convened to determine if suspension or expulsion is appropriate.

I expect my students to follow the rules of academic honesty in this class. I will teach you how to paraphrase sources and to properly cite and introduce sources so that you do not need to worry about accidentally plagiarizing.

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What Is Paraphrasing? How Do You Do It?

Teachers will tell you that paraphrasing means to “put an author’s ideas in your own words.” That’s the standard definition. But what does that really mean? It’s definitely not as simple as it sounds. The most important thing to remember is that paraphrasing is not really about the words; it’s about the ideas. In other words, paraphrasing really means to think about what you have read, to digest the ideas, to make them part of your own thought processes, and then (and only then, after you have considered the ideas) express them in a way that is meaningful to you. You cannot, of course, change the meaning when you paraphrase; however, you must change not only the vocabulary but also the phrase structure. If you keep the author’s phrase structure, you are still using his/her thought processes, and that is still plagiarism—it is copying an author’s creative work, and it is dishonest.

Reading Process

Here is the process that you should use when you need to paraphrase something for a summary or for a research paper. You will probably need a paper copy of the material so that you can write down definitions of words and mark important points. Good paraphrasing requires active reading, which means marking, underlining, highlighting, circling, some kind of physical interaction with the material. Passive reading is ineffective if you need to truly understand what you read and remember it.

1. Read the material once quickly without using a dictionary. You may underline words that you don’t know, but don’t interrupt your reading by translating while you read. If something is confusing, don’t worry; just continue reading, because it will probably become clearer as you read further (sometimes a later sentence explains an earlier sentence).

2. Look up the words that you don’t know. Write definitions/translations on the paper copy of the material. Re-read the sentences with the definitions/translations to see how the words affect the meaning.

3. Read the material again and make sure that you understand the whole idea—not just the vocabulary but also the point. Make sure that you have a good understanding of the author’s broad meaning, including the relationships among individual ideas.

4. Now take notes on the material: Break the material into sections and take notes on each section on a separate piece of paper (or in a computer file). You may use English or your first language for your notes (using your first language will help you avoid copying the author’s phrases; you can focus on the meaning if you use your first language). Write a couple of sentences for each section.

5. Write your paraphrase from your notes. DO NOT LOOK AT THE MATERIAL while you’re paraphrasing! If you do look at it, you will either 1) copy the author’s phrases or 2) not be able to think of any other way to express the ideas.

If you need to write a formal summary of the material, in step #3, you should use colored highlighter pens to mark the author’s points. For example, use yellow every time you see the main point (thesis) repeated; use pink for sub-points and blue for sub-sub-points. Your summary will include the yellow point and the pink points but not the blue points.

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Paraphrasing Strategies

Paraphrasing is also often defined as “saying the same thing in a different way.” But how do you do that? Especially, how do you do that if you have limited English vocabulary and limited English syntax? Here are some strategies that may help.

• Take notes in your first language. Your first language is probably still your “thinking language.” That means that you can think about complex ideas more comfortably, and recognize relationships between ideas more easily, in your native/mother tongue. After you have mentally processed the ideas in your comfortable language, then you should be able to express them more fluently in English.

• When you paraphrase a sentence, reverse and mix up the order of the ideas: Start at the end of the sentence and go backwards. Also change the sentence type—compound instead of complex, or putting an idea in a dependent instead of an independent clause. For example:

“It is time to hold ourselves and all of our students to a new and higher standard of rigor—one that is defined according to 21st century criteria” (Wagner).

The new standards of the 21st century should determine what “rigor” means in education, and both teachers and students must now be held to these higher standards. (paraphrase)

• Change the functions of words in a sentence. That is, change noun phrases into adjective phrases, verb phrases into noun phrases, adverb phases into verb phrases, subjects into objects, active voice to passive voice, and so on. For example:

“Even in our best schools, we are teaching kids to memorize much more than to think. And in the 21st century, mere memorization won’t get you very far” (Wagner).

Memorizing is still taught more than thinking is. The best schools also teach this ineffective learning strategy. (paraphrase; note that I repeated the phrase “best schools,” but I used it in a different phrase structure, as a subject instead of as an object)

• If you’re having a lot of trouble finding a new way to express an author’s ideas, break a sentence down into its meaningful parts. Then look for new ways to express each part. Then put it back together again in the new phrases and words.

“Employees in the 21st century have to manage an astronomical amount of information flowing into their work lives on a daily basis” (Wagner).

Employees have to manage information. (workers must face/deal with/handle info)This information is astronomical. (it’s a huge amount of info)These are 21st century employees. (employees today/in the modern world)This information flows into their work lives. (this happens at work)This information flows in on a daily basis. (every day)

In the modern world, a huge amount of information faces people at work every day. (paraphrase)

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Language-Learning Strategies

Some teachers will tell you that when you paraphrase, you may repeat “no more than three consecutive words.” That’s a common rule. However, it’s a bad rule. Words like “the” and “is” and “and” don’t really count, and some four-word phrases are so common that you must repeat them, or you’ll end up with a very strange-sounding sentence. I had a student once who tried to paraphrase “The House of Representatives” because her previous teacher had told her that she couldn’t copy more than three words! In other words, when you paraphrase, you may repeat common phrases and words. But how can you figure out if a phrase is “common” or not? How do you know if the author’s phrase is the only way to express an idea?

Furthermore, sometimes repeating only one word is dishonest because it was a very creative word choice by the author. Remember that the basic concept of academic honesty is that you must never claim someone else’s creative intellectual work as your own. As a non-native speaker, how do you know if a single word is a creative choice and shouldn’t be “stolen” by a student?

Here are some general strategies for avoiding unnecessary rephrasing or inappropriate use of an author’s words and phrases:

• Do a quick Google search to see if a phrase is used a million-billion times by other writers. If it is, it’s probably a very common phrase, and it’s OK to repeat it. But remember that you should be restructuring the author’s sentences, so you can probably find a way to avoid the phrase anyway if you’re not sure if it’s OK to repeat it.

• Check to see if the author uses the same word/phrase throughout the whole article. If he/she does, it’s probably a common word/phrase, and you can repeat it. Also check other articles to see if other authors use that same word/phrase for the thing/concept.

• Ask me, someone in the Writing Lab, or a native-speaking friend if it’s a common word or phrase.

A Very Important Final Point

As already noted, if you simply substitute synonyms and keep the same sentence structure, that’s still plagiarism because you’re copying the author’s thought processes—you’re not really thinking about the ideas and their relationships. Besides, you’ll probably end up with a very strange-sounding sentence. Sometimes the original words are the only words that sound appropriate in that particular structure. I often correct vocabulary in a student’s paraphrase because the word choices sound odd, but when I’m done correcting the words, I have reproduced the author’s original sentence! And then I realize that the student was just substituting synonyms, not really paraphrasing.

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Notes on Quotes: Special Circumstances

When you quote from a source, you must use the source’s exact words. Everything between the quotation marks must be exactly as it was in the original—same words, same spelling, same punctuation, capitalization. However, there are some special circumstances in which you may change an author’s words. You need to know about these and other special circumstances.

1. If only part of a source’s sentence is useful to you, you may leave out some words. If you do this, you must use ellipses to show that you omitted words. When you do this, the remaining quotation must still make sense, and the meaning must be the same as in the original material.

“Our attention span . . . is not in the limited supply that marketers would have us believe . . .” (Zandt).

2. If you need to add a very basic word to make a quote fit into your introductory sentence, or to clarify the meaning of the quote, you may do that. If you add something to a quote, you must use brackets around the added/changed words. For example, you can add “that” or a verb, or replace a vague pronoun with a specific noun. You may not, of course, add words that change the meaning of the quotation.

“But as serious as this argument is, it’s equally important not to leave people with the impression that one is arguing [that] global warming is mainly going to impact other countries, and not [Americans]” (Romm).

3. If a quote has an error in it, you may either correct it in brackets, or add the word sic in brackets after the error so that your reader (your teacher!) knows that it wasn’t you who made the error. “Sic” is a Latin word meaning “thus” or “so.” You should put the word in italics since it is a non-English word (all foreign words are always put in italics). Unfortunately, many online articles have typing errors in them, so this is a useful thing to know.

“McDonalds [sic] just announced an additional $20 million annually to open 30 outlets each year in India” (Srivastava).

4. When you quote something that has a quote inside it, use single quotation marks inside the double quotation marks (this is the only time that you should ever use single quotation marks).

“The obesity epidemic has become so alarming in the US that it led to more than 130 retired generals, admirals and senior military leaders to frame the issue as a national security threat, writing that, ‘Obesity rates threaten the overall health of America and the future strength of our military’” (Srivastava).

5. When you quote more than four typed lines, do not use quotation marks. Instead, indent the quotation ten spaces from the left margin and put the final period before the parenthetical citation. (Note: This quote is four lines in 12-point font; I made it small to fit on this page!)

Corby Kummer discusses another issue related to fast food:

Since it appeared in 2001, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation has been the master text for anyone

who ever wondered what life is like for the cooks, servers, and cleaners in fast-food chains and the

slaughterhouse workers who process the factory-farmed animals served in them. Degrading,

remorseless, and maiming is often the answer. (92)

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Writing Summaries

There are several different kinds of summaries, and you must know which kind your professor is asking you to write. You may be asked to write any of the following, or a combination of these types of summaries:

• review/report—to show understanding of what you’ve read

• critical—to place the writing in a larger context or to compare it to another writer’s position

• evaluative—to evaluate the writer’s ideas and/or writing style

• application—to show understanding of a principle/theory that you’ve studied and to show your ability to apply it to real situations

• opinion/response—to give your own opinions on or responses to the author’s ideas.

While working in the Writing Center, I’ve seen many, many summary assignments in classes all across the college—chemistry, economics, health professions, biology, accounting, humanities. Most of these summary assignments were a combination of review-report and application.

You will do a review-report summary of the article assigned (see description of assignments for this unit). Your summary will be double-spaced, with the article title, author, and source (magazine) typed at the bottom of the page. Remember that a review-report summary must tell the general idea of the article first, and then mention all the major sub-points. It doesn’t give all the details, but it explains the sub-points clearly enough that a reader could understand the article author’s ideas by reading your summary. It does not add any ideas that are not in the article. And, of course, it does not plagiarize any phrases in the article.

I recommend the following process:

1. Read the article first to get a basic understanding of the author’s ideas. Don’t mark on the paper during the first reading, and don’t use a dictionary; trust yourself to understand more as you read.2. Now go back and read the article again, making sure that you understand all the ideas. This time, look up vocabulary that you don’t know. Mark the sub-points in one color and the sub-sub-points in another color. Your summary should include the ideas which you’ve marked as sub-points, but not those which you’ve marked as sub-sub-points.3. Next, take very brief notes on the article, perhaps in your first language to avoid copying.4. Then hide the article from yourself and write your summary from your notes. If you look at the article while you’re writing your summary, you will almost certainly copy phrases (or your mind will go blank and you won’t be able to think of any other way to express the ideas). 5. Finally, check your summary against the article to make sure the summary is accurate and to make sure you haven’t accidentally copied any phrases. Make any necessary corrections.

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Summary Guidelines

Some teachers may ask you to write summaries that give your own opinion or that evaluate an article. In your assignment for this class, however, you will simply summarize the ideas in an article. Following are basic guidelines for this kind of summary.

1. Have a general statement of the author’s main idea at the opening of a summary.

2. Begin a summary by giving the author’s name and the article’s title, in a sentence that also tells the main idea of the article. This sentence is like a thesis for the summary. If the article is informative, use the verb “reports” or “tells”; if it’s an opinion article, use “argues.” For example:

In the article “Action #3: Buy Less Stuff,” Ellis Jones, Ross Haenfler, and Brett Johnson argue that . . .

Use italics for the titles of magazines (and newspapers, books, websites, and movies). Put quotation marks around the titles of articles (including web pages). Capitalize the first and last words in a title; capitalize the first word and last words in a subtitle. Capitalize all other words in a title except articles (a, an, the), prepositions, conjunctions, and the “to” part of infinitives.

Give the author’s name exactly as it is printed. The first time you mention the author’s name, give the full name. After the first mention, refer to the author by last name only; don’t use social titles (Mr., Miss, or Ms.). If the author has a professional title (Dr.), you may use that.

3. If you quote from the article (use the author’s words), you must use quotation marks; if you don’t, that’s plagiarism, which is a very serious academic violation. If you’re using a paper source, put the page number of the quote in parentheses at the end of the sentence. Always introduce quotes:

According to Jones, Haenfler, and Johnson, you can save resources if you “Check out books, movies, and CDs from your local library.”

4. Don’t quote too much. If you quote too much, it looks like you didn’t understand the ideas in the article. Try to paraphrase: Put the author’s ideas in your own words. If you paraphrase, do not use quotation marks.

5. Cover all the major subpoints in the article. Your first job in summarizing is to decide what the article’s main point is, then what the major subpoints are. You can change the author’s order of presentation if doing that helps you to represent the whole discussion.

6. Don’t give the details. Just give enough explanation so that somebody could understand the author’s ideas from reading your summary.

7. Just give the author’s ideas. For a report-style summary, don’t add opinions or examples.

8. Use present tense to talk about the author’s statements—Smith says, Smith adds. Always use present tense for writing about anything that is recorded, whether on paper or on the web.

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Persuasive Writing:Analyzing Your Target Audience for Effective Writing Choices

In order to plan your persuasive essay effectively, you need to think carefully about your audience. Persuasive writing emphasizes an audience’s needs; you have something that you want to say, but they are the focus here. You can’t persuade people to change their behavior unless you show that you are aware of their values and interests, and unless you write in a way that is considerate of values and interests.

Write a description of your audience, including the following factors: age, culture, lifestyle, fears, interests, values, biases, needs.

Then comment on how these “identity factors” of your audience will influence:

the content of the essaythe style of the essayyour choice of effective sub-pointsyour choice of effective sources

Don’t worry about grammar and sentence structure; just type freely and get as many details about your audience and your writing choices as possible. If you need to write in your first language, that’s OK.

• • •

Description of Target Audience Example

Focus: the need to avoid health problems by eating less prepared/packaged food, more food cooked from raw ingredients

Thesis: Even though it may be easier—and sometimes more tastier—to eat at restaurants or make a quick meal from a box or a can, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor if you go back to the cooking and eating habits that you had when you were young. Your generation knew what it was doing when it cooked everything from scratch and used fresh ingredients from the garden.

Role: a concerned member of the next generation (specifically, a concerned daughter)

My audience is middle-class Americans of my parents’ generation, aged 70-80, who are suffering a growing number of health problems related to their eating habits. These people have unfortunately bought into the modern packaged/prepared/restaurant diet, maybe because it’s easier, as they’re getting older, to do less work in the kitchen, but mostly because they just don’t realize that this food is unhealthy. They like to eat out a lot (a lot!), and to them, a tomato is a tomato whether it’s on the vine or in a can. They haven’t paid attention to the recent research showing that fresh food has more nutrition and is free of the dangerous chemicals in industrially preserved food. Also, they’ve seen so many food fads come and go during their long lives that they’ve stopped listening, and they probably see the swing toward fresh food as just one more fad that will go away soon like all the others. Besides, these people became adults during the era of “scientific agriculture” in the 1950s: They learned to respect chemical farming as the source

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of plentiful food for a nation and a world recovering from World War II. It’s difficult for them now to give up that respect for science, industry, and modern advances in food technology; it’s a part of their whole perspective on life (this is especially true of my dad, who got his degree in agriculture in 1956, when the U of I was teaching nothing but fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides!). Also, eating packaged/prepared food makes these people feel modern; they don’t want to give up that part of their identity and go back to the “made from scratch,” “grow your own food” eating style of their childhoods during the Great Depression. One more “identity factor” makes them not want to give up their eating habits: They’ve reached a point in their lives when they have enough money, and they feel that being able to eat out at restaurants several times a week is a mark of their success; it makes them feel good to eat out instead of eating at home.

If I want to successfully persuade these people to go back to an older style of eating, I will need to be very respectful in my tone. I can’t sound like I think I know better than they do; instead, I will refer to their superior knowledge of home cooking, make them look back with nostalgia on the wonderful meals that they ate when they were young. I will describe those meals and praise their mothers’ cooking ability. But I’ll also need to give some tactful advice on how to cook like this without doing too much hard work in the kitchen; after all, these are older people, and they don’t have as much energy as they used to have, so they need some quick and simple meal ideas. When I give information about the unhealthy aspects of packaged/prepared food, I will mix it in with the description of healthy fresh food—probably in a contrast method, so that it isn’t too irritating (pure information can be extremely irritating when people really don’t want to hear it!). It will be tricky to bring in information on the serious health effects of packaged/prepared food; I don’t want to scare them too much, but I want them know what they’re doing to their bodies. Maybe I can sneak that info in by saying “You don’t want to be like other people who are getting diabetes, etc.” Or maybe I can draw a word-picture of strong old people in the past, without the diabetes, heart disease, allergies, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease—and then encourage my audience to try to live up to the standards of their parents and grandparents.

I will need to use sources with scientific credibility because that’s what these people respect. I can’t use websites from “organic chefs” or California “whole food” fans; that’s exactly what my audience doesn’t respect. Government sources would probably also be effective.

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Oh Jin Kwon

Dr. Sue Kuykendall

ESL 101-094

24 Feb. 2010

Summary of “Deadly Salmonella: Frozen Food’s Newest Ingredient”

In the article “Deadly Salmonella: Frozen Food’s Newest Ingredient,” Jim Hightower

reports about the risk of salmonella caused by irresponsible industrialization and greed, and he

criticizes the duplicity of America’s pot-pie companies. He points out that the salmonella in

Banquet pot-pies killed many people in 2007. Nevertheless, he thinks that while it is true that

salmonella is lethal to human health, actually “globalization and greed” are the deadly causes of

the disease because food companies are buying cheap ingredients from countries without food

safety standards. Hightower also mentions the problem of ConAgra to prove their error. Not

only did the company not test for the bacteria until salmonella came to be a hot issue, but they

also cannot determine which ingredients are problems to humans even though they are doing

random tests now, and their lobbying group has resisted a law to require tracking of ingredients.

By issuing a sarcastic “ALARMING CONSUMER ALERT,” Hightower tells us that the cooking

instructions of frozen food companies are just a blindfold. They say the pot-pies will be safe if

we cook them to a temperature of 165 degrees; however, he tells us that, according to The New

York Times, “all of various brands of pot pies failed to achieve the magic level of 165 degrees.”

Because of these many problems, the author asserts that frozen food should be convenient and

safe for consumers, and food companies should take responsibility for food safety.

Hightower, Jim. “Deadly Salmonella: Frozen Food’s Newest Ingredient.” AlterNet.

Independent Media Institute, 28 May 2009. Web. 24 Aug. 2009.

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Serin Kim

Dr. Sue Kuykendall

ESL 101-094

March 10, 2010

Audience: Female international students in the United StatesRole: Fellow female international student living in the United States

Get Moving to Cook for Yourself and Do Activities for a Healthy Life in the U.S.

As everyone has a dream of the opportunity to have a high quality education in America,

countless people come to the U.S. from many different countries as you did. Since I am an

international student, I know exactly how you feel and live in America. You have stronger

motivations to learn and study than ordinary American students because you came here, leaving

your family, friends, and life in your country. Therefore, you would focus on your schoolwork,

spending your time to study for exams and quizzes and doing many different assignments for all

your classes, rather than thinking about what, when, and how many times you should eat per day.

Have you improved your English skills and academic knowledge since you came here? I believe

that you have. Your ultimate goal seems to be going in the right direction. What about your

health? Do you think that you are healthier than you were in your country? Unfortunately, it is

obvious that you have gained lots of weight and lost health since you came to live in America. If

you want to get back your healthy body and stay in good shape, you must learn how to cook

healthy food for yourself instead of eating outside and buying frozen or instant food.

There is a term for freshmen who gain about 15 pounds their first year in university: the

“Freshman 15.” This tells us that most college students who live in an unfamiliar place would

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have some damage to their health. Similarly, since coming to live in North America, I’ve gained

about 20 pounds. When I first realized that, I panicked and did not know what to do to recover

my healthy, strong body. Then, I started to recall what kind of food I have eaten here. There are

three problems that I have had. First, I have eaten junk food since I came to live here. I usually

went out with my boyfriend eight times a week or ordered on the phone and then picked up my

food to bring home rather than making dishes at home. My favorite restaurants were Steak &

Shake, Taco Bell, Jimmy John’s, and Papa John’s Pizza, which all serve fast foods. There are a

few Korean cuisine restaurants in my town, but I did not love to go there because the price is

approximately two or three times that at most fast food restaurants. Moreover, I did cook Korean

transitional food or other kinds of food at home for my first year in U.S. because it takes a lot of

time and I did not have time to do it. And even if I knew that pre-prepared, instant, or frozen

foods are harmful to my body, I usually went to Wal-Mart and bought them because it is true that

they are really simple to fix and eat, and the cheapest food ever in the grocery store. The third

reason that I gained that much weight is the decrease in the frequency of exercise. In fact, I did

not take exercise as much as I did when I was in my country. I enjoyed any physical activities

and also worked out five times a week in Korea. However, I went to the gym only one or two

times a week here. Over all, not only had my eating habit adapted to Americans’ eating habit, but

also my lifestyle was changed. Foolishly, I thought that it was wasting my time to cook for

myself and go to the gym to burn calories or fat in my body because I had to focus on improving

my English skills and getting good grades in school rather than my health. I could not notice that

the quality of my health was getting worse. In contrast, a falling grade on exams or assignments

was very obvious and stressful to me. I believe that you have the same situation as me. You have

a specific goal in living in America so that you would think that the most important thing is to

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study and then make good marks at school. Nevertheless, you are wrong. Getting good grades is

definitely not as significant as your health- both physically and psychologically.

As I mentioned above, most of you must get accustomed to American eating habits. You

most likely consume American transitional food combinations, that is, hamburger, pizza, chicken

wing, and soda, forgetting your country’s transitional dishes. There is an old saying, “When in

Rome, do as the Romans do.” However, think about whether it is beneficial for you to get used

to American unhealthy foods. There already are or will be two types of negative impacts on you.

They are effects on your physical health and effects on your personal life. According to the

United States Department of Agriculture in “American’s Eating Habits: Changes and

Consequences,” unhealthy eating habits can cause some serious diseases, such as overweight,

diabetes, heart attack, hypotension, high blood pressure, and so on, which can lead to death

(United). In fact, the United States has the highest level of obesity all over the world, accounting

for 30.6% of the whole populations in the U.S (“Obesity”). As result of those physical effects,

you will ruin the quality of your personal life as much as your health. As there is no doubt that

all women are concerned about their weight and body shape, you have a dream of a well-shaped

body. Suppose that you become overweight while you live here. The dream will be shattered.

You are going to get so depressed or lose so much energy that you will not be able to make good

grades in school because you cannot concentrate on and be confident about what you do.

Moreover, you can also lose your social life. For example, you will not be willing to go out or

hang out with your friends here and will prefer to stay at home. Then, your depression and self-

confidence will be getting deeper, deeper, and deeper. You will be locked in a vicious circle in

the future unless if you refuse to accustom yourself to American unhealthy foods,

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To solve your problem which comes from wrong eating habits, you have two types of

solutions. One is directly related to what and how you eat. First, you can choose what dishes you

would like to eat and buy fresh ingredients which are neither pre-prepared food nor frozen,

instant food. You can cook your meals for yourself. If you do not know how to do so, you must

learn. Because you do not have time to come back home and cook meals for yourself between

each class, you should bring your meal that you cooked last night or early in the morning to

school. If the meal should be cool, you can use a cool pack. And if you need to heat up your

meal, you can use the microwave in the cafeteria at school. Cooking can be annoying to you, it

was to me, and I used the excuse that I was too busy to do it. However, you know that

homemade food is much more healthful than convenient food in fast food restaurants or grocery

stores. Also, you should change your shopping habits. When you go shopping with your friends

at Marketplace Mall, you usually spend three or four hours in order to find the best fit and

beautiful dresses, shining jewelry, lovely boots or shoes. However, do you shop this carefully for

healthy ingredients for your body? In the frozen and instant food section in Wal-Mart, I

encounter many international students during the day or night time. All I remember is that their

carts aree filled up with many different kinds of instant noodles or pasta, frozen pizza or meat

balls, and a few large bottles of soda. There are some fresh fruits and vegetables but only a few.

From now on, do not even look at the unhealthy foods which are not made by your own hands.

Also, you could find your country’s transitional grocery store and organic food stores. Why do

you care so much about what you wear and what you look like but not what you eat? No matter

what you wear, you will look beautiful only if the inside of your body is healthy, which depends

on what you eat.

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The other solution is to get moving. I know that since soap operas from your country

make you feel less lonely and isolated, you enjoy watching them. Because you and I as

international students feel lonely and we live among strangers and in an unfamiliar place which

is very far from our family, close friends, or lovely pets, a sense of isolation or loneliness is

natural. But, is watching TV from home actually helpful for you to live here or overcome this

problem? It is helpful neither to be healthy, nor to develop your English skills. You do not move

at all while watching the soap operas. Instead, put on some comfortable clothe, go outside, and

then run some miles while breathing fresh air. You will feel better than when you sit in a chair

and look at your laptop screen. Besides, you can research to find some leisure sports or fitness

programs. Find something fit to you, and register. Feel yourself burning your dirty fat in your

body and getting healthier.

To sum up, while you are living here in the U.S, it is necessary for you to adapt yourself

to a totally different, new environment, consider how you have an effect on your health from

consuming fast, convenient foods and what foods are right to eat. Now, you know that your body

is in danger. Protect yourself by cooking foryourself. I know that changing your entire eating

habits or lifestyle, which you already got used to, is really difficult. Imagine, however, how

happy you will be when you get back to your normal size!  You will feel like yourself again. In

fact, if you're happy with your appearance and confident with more energy, you will enjoy your

time in the US more.  You will be able to take better advantage of this opportunity to learn a new

culture and a new language, and you will go home with better memories of your time in

America. That happiness and enjoyment can be started by your own healthy eating habits and

life.

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Works Cited

“Obesity by Country.” NationMaster.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Mar. 2010.

United States Department of Agriculture. “Americans’ Eating Habits: Changes and

Consequences.” Economic Research Service. United States Department of Agriculture,

May 1999. Web. 8 Mar. 2010.

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