Building a First Draft

If you are familiar with writing nonfiction pieces, you understand the amount of research and preparation that must go into the planning stage. For the last few weeks, I have been blogging about several steps I have taken in yvpreparation to write a scicomm article as well as a literature review, but today I want to highlight what I found to be most helpful! I originally sparked some of my ideas while annotating a variety of TIMES articles about the animal mind. I have mentioned many times my interest in animal cognition, so I found the article "Intelligence" by Jeffrey Klugler to be the most relevant to that interest. I have reread it multiple times to refresh my overall understanding of what researchers consider to be "high" intelligence and use that knowledge when discussing dog cognition in my review. I also found curating tweets for X to be extremely helpful! Reading studies and articles, and scrolling through accounts to find information to share has allowed me to enjoy the research process. Social media is fun, and I enjoyed the challenge of needing to simplify the big ideas to be eye-catching. The most useful step, although tedious, has been close readings of the articles I included in my review. Reading scientific articles, especially if you are unfamiliar, is overwhelming. They include scientific jargon, statistics, and detailed procedures, but being able to break them down into the questions of "why?" and "so what?" makes it much easier to identify trends and relationships between articles. The relationship is ultimately what defines the literature review!

Reflecting on my first draft, I am happy with the initial product. I think the introductory paragraph does a good job of prefacing the species I am discussing (free-ranging dogs) and the overarching idea that I weave throughout my body paragraphs. I also think I effectively incorporated knowledge from TIMES magazine articles and additional research studies outside of my chosen three. One of the researchers of my chosen studies specializes in free-ranging dog behavior, and I wanted to include more of his studies to expand on his findings and my central theme. During this process, I have learned that my topic is very complex and connected to domestic dog cognition and behavior. Most of my studies build this comparison into their introductions and discussions, which is why I also selected one of my three studies to be about domestic dog behavior. Since this comparison is a key component to my argument of free-ranging dogs and their advanced cognition, I tried to make that clear throughout my writing. However, the connection could be unclear at parts, so I think my later rewrites could centralize more on free-ranging dogs.

Over the next few weeks, if you follow along with me on X, I will be posting very regularly for a campaign I'm doing! I will be continuing to focus on free-ranging dogs, as I myself am interested in knowing the ways we as humans are improving their livelihood. I want to highlight organizations that make the efforts to keep these dogs healthy and happy. We prioritize the well-being of our pet dogs, and I belive the same logic should be applied to free-ranging dogs. In my initial search, I have found two organizations, Four Paws and Humane Society International, that strive to improve the overall health of free-ranging dogs through vaccinations, veterinary visits, and resource supply.