For my Experience and Other Evidence paper, I plan to research the habits of an average person that can cause cancer. In my personal experience, cancer was the first disease that took an important person from my life ten years ago. The first question my paper will cover is "What is cancer?" The purpose of this question is to teach others what cancer is and how it comes about. Learning the process of cancer leads to the two other questions, "What are the causes that instigate cancer?" and "What are the effects of cancer?" When the paper is completed, these two questions will be combined in order to understand that certain behaviors cause the effects of cancer.
These questions will be answered in the paper by my personal experiences with my grandfather during his last year and researched evidence in other sources.
I think this is a great topic to do a research paper on! It's sad that you lost your grandfather by cancer. I hope you can tie in your personal aspects into this paper to grip the readers on what it means to lose a cancer patient!
ReplyDeleteExactly, your experiences with the disease will make this paper a lot more gripping for readers. You will also be able to incorporate very vivid descriptions to link to your research!
ReplyDeleteI find that cancer can be a relatable topic with so many people, and reading about it will always be interesting.
ReplyDeleteMagic Thesis Sentence:
ReplyDeleteBy looking at the habits of cancer patients, we can understand how cancer comes to be in certain people, which most readers don't see; this is important because understanding the development of cancer will help people understand how to lower their risk for cancer.
David, I think you have a compelling story linked to this paper, which will fuel your research and help draw in your reader as well. I think you have some promising questions to begin with, however, I want to encourage you to push your questions further into the territory of a concrete debate that is at the same time manageable. There are many competing studies about what causes cancer/ how to prevent it, so this may mean you'll have to focus in on one kind. You might also, for this paper, think about defining cancer both biologically and historically (was cancer what we used to call "wasting away"?) as Kleinman does with the word "stigma." You might also think about whether our interest as a country in cancer is new, whether it is subsiding. Is it the most visible disease? (i.e. we wear ribbons of a different color for each kind, we do walks and races for them. is this a good thing? I'm thinking of the end of Frank's "Tricksters and Truthtellers," where he discusses the issue of "Hijacked" narratives, taken over by marketing initiatives that distract from finding a cure. Also, why are some cancers (breast, prostate) more talked about than other, rarer ones? How is popularity created?
ReplyDeleteI also have two articles that I had to keep off the syllabus that may be useful:
Catherine Belling "Narrating Oncogenesis: The Problem of Telling where Cancer Begins"
Kristen Gardner "Disruption and Cancer Narratives: From Awareness to Advocacy."
I can help you find these during Library Day if you like.
Nice start. I look forward to seeing where you go with it.