October 31, Hw #1, Reading Reflection
Ethics Chapter 6
The more that I read this book the more I enjoy it. This chapter was how the tobacco industry over the last fifty years has and continues to try to mislead readers by manipulating the verbiage used when defending smoking in relation to lung cancer. They were unethical because they promoted their product knowing that it would have adverse health effects to their customers.
One thing that I pulled from this chapter this week was how effective images can be in persuading an audience. R. J. Reynolds targeted an audience by using the Joe Camel character for advertising. Joe Camel was shown to be a cool, confident, trend setting, attractive, and innocent character. No matter how controversial the issues were concerning the health effects of smoking the images that were being used were effective bringing in new customers. It presenting smoking as the "no worries, cool thing to do".
There were several things that I found disturbing, one being, the fact that research was funded focused on the effectiveness of reaching a young crowd of customers.
I know that in the future I will consider using images on more of my documents.
Concise Guide, Chapter 4
This chapter focused on putting more thought in to research. It covered the different types of research materials that are out there to use and explained how your source needs to be credible.
This chapter will help me on WP#3. Page #62 gave information "Evaluating Sources from the Web" explained if you can not clearly find the authors name and credentials of the source you should assume that it is not credible. You should also use different types of research materials to reflect a range of other points of views. I will consider this when writing proposals or when doing research for issues in my work place.
I liked all the checklists that were provided especially the one on conducting a interview for research there were good tips.