For this assignment we were tasked with writing a five hundred word consumer based article about the health benefits of fish oil. Writing the article was much more of a challenge than I originally expected. When my partner and I were first looking over the assignment, we thought it would be relatively simple to write a five hundred-word document. Although this was our preconception about the assignment, it was definitely not the case, as we faced a number of challenges throughout the writing process.
Our first challenge arose when it came to narrowing down the scope of our topic. Because our topic choices were quite broad including carbohydrates and the Glycemic Index, health benefits of popular foods, or benefits of fish oil. Once we chose that we were going to focus our article on the health benefits of fish oil, we then had the task of determining what aspect of the topic we were going to focus on given the short length of the article. Taking such a broad topic as fish oil and narrowing it down to a topic that could be covered well in five hundred words, and would be relevant to people today was quite a challenge. To overcome this problem, we decided to look and see what types of consumer articles on our topic are already out there to ensure that ours did not overlap. Upon doing some research, we found that there was less information out there on fish oil, and decided to make this the focus of our article.
Our second challenge arose when we had decided on a topic and were looking for reliable sources of information. A problem I have come across in both this assignment and others is knowing whether or not the information being sourced is reliable. To avoid this problem, we decided to only use peer reviewed articles sourced through .
Another problem we faced was taking scientific articles, which are often loaded with jargon, and technical terms that are not always known by the consumer. To write this article at a grade six reading level, we tried to reflect back on consumer articles we have read about topics that are outside of out field of expertise, and tried to model ours on such articles. Once we got into this mindset, it became much easier to take the complex language from the articles, and translate it into an article that would relay the information to the consumer.
The last difficulty we faced was ensuring that we included meaningful information into the short space provided. It was very difficult to take the broad scope of information from the articles that we looked at, and determine what was the most important information to include in the article. To determine this, we tried to look at the information from consumers prospective to try and imagine what they would find the most relevant. Once we shifted our mind set, it made sifting through the information much simpler.
Overall writing this article on the health benefits of fish oil was a challenge, but one that got us to push outside of our comfort zones, and gave us an invaluable experience that will help us as we move forward into our careers as Dietitian’s.