The section of the little seagull that I decided to read was the section on MLA citations. I was hoping that reading this chapter would help me cite sources and better understand the process of using citations and making a work cited page since I have never liked making citations and I have never been good at making citations. This chapter basically went through all the niche rules for how to format in text citations in MLA, as well as detailed instructions on how to properly cite about 50 different source types in the work cited page. This will be very useful because I have struggled both at in text citations and making work cited pages. This will be especially useful since in this assignment I have a lot of different sources to cite and some of them are unconventional so I will definitely reference this chapter when I make the work cited page

https://blog.reedsy.com/narrative-arc/

Listed above are links to three pieces of media that I plan to use as multi modal additions in my essay. two of these links lead to images I will use in my title (one is a source YouTube link I have the the image that I will use saved all ready). One image is of a classic narrative arc stylized to look like a roller coaster and the other is an image of roller coaster tracks which I found to look chaotic. These two images will be displayed with the title of the paper since I want the comparison of life as a classic narrative and as something chaotic to be burned into my readers mind from the beginning. My addition is a YouTube video on chaos theory and the butterfly effect which I plan to insert before I start to talk about the chaos of life to give the reader some background information. The video will specifically explain the concept that complex systems (I will argue like us) are so easily affected and are affected by so many things that both tiny things can make giant differences (butterfly effect) and that complex systems can’t be accurately predicted. I want to argue that people are complex systems with timelines of events that rarely if ever follow the regular pattern of classic literary narrative and that because of this you can’t get an accurate personal narrative thinking in this way, and that if you look back on your life and only connect the things that happened that built on each other in ways that you believe furthered your “story” you will leave out massive chunks of what actually happened. I will also argue that despite this narrative structure can be useful in describing parts of your life and I will use Ben’s narrative project

I think that the author has a really good point when she talks about the dangers of  self narrative thinking. I am personally a sucker for siding with the side that less people agree with because I personally believe that humanities greatest threat is becoming an echo chamber of ideas where the societal norm of ideas is basically forced upon everyone (especially now that we are all connected with social media) but I actually really like this non conformist idea more than I usually do. I personally can look back and see several moments where my decision making was heavily influenced by my perceived self narrative. Two big ones that I remember, one that I let my self narrative win and one that I didn’t were when I was miserable at a private middle school I used to attend because a lot of my friends left. I almost also left that school but I thought that my personal narrative would be tainted by not sticking with my old school until graduation. A similar thing happened my senior year of high school when I decided I didn’t really like playing school basketball anymore. Basketball had been really important to me for a long time so it was hard for me to decide to stop and was even harder because it had always been expected of me by myself and my loved ones that my self narrative would include me playing basketball throughout high school. I am happy that I stopped playing though. I hope I can continue avoiding making the wrong decisions because of self narrative.

Moment one that caught my eye was when Beck said “A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important.” It kind of stuck to me because it brought clarity to why I gave the self narrative that I did during my practice grad school interview. I didn’t put a ton of thought into exactly what I said but I naturally started at the first chronological spot of my life that has meaning to the people who gave me the interview and I told my story in a way that has meaning in the context of the interview. Another bit that stood out to me was when storytelling was described as a way of making sense of the world around us. This stood out to me because towards the beginning high school and college when I was presented with a new confusing environment I would reflect on my “life story” to try and connect what was happening now with what has happened before and what will happen in the future and it really helped me adjust to my new environment pretty quickly. The final part that stood out to me was “the act of framing our lives as a narrative is neither negative or positive, it just is” and I think that this part is referring to how as people we usually make logical connections as narratives because that’s how we naturally perceive things. I thought of it like using a fallen tree to cross a stream, the trees purpose isn’t necessarily to help you cross a stream but you can use it to cross a stream but it could also break and make you fall in. You just never know.

Daisy Bryant note:

Your organization as well as your content is very polished all ready and I personally wouldn’t make any major changes to either of those areas. The one big thing that I would recommend doing is adding more in terms of linking nursing specifically to all the points you make (I listed some places linking nursing would fit well above) which should also boost your word count which should kill two birds with one stone for you. Other than that there are only relatively small transitional errors that you could fix as well as an argument that you started to make that you dedicated one sentence to than decided to move on. Your thesis looks pretty solid but after adding the extra nursing material and your other changes I would go back and look at it again and see if you can make it fit the rest of your paper even better.

Writing prompt 2 Outline:

Thesis (first draft): In pharmacy the ideal relationship between art and science is a high level of empathy borrowed from art to be able to connect to patients so pharmacists can give the proper personal care to a patient by maintaining strong patient provider lines of communication, the other creative aspects of art should be reserved only to act as a compass to guide the scientific process of inventing new medicines and coming up with new ways to help patients, and finally there should be a solid foundation of scientific method and thinking behind the artistic ideas that make sure that the artistic methods don’t misguide us into doing something objectively bad for our patients.

Claim sentence 1: Empathy is extremely important to a pharmacist since not only do pharmacists constantly have to help integrate medication plans into peoples lives but they are also have the unique responsibility of being the most accessible (its free to visit a pharmacy and ask the pharmacist questions) medical professional for people to reach out too, especially among populations that have a hard time affording medical care.

Claim sentence 2: Creative aspects of art should help guide pharmacists because the scientific process doesn’t help very much with the personal interactions between patients and pharmacists and artistic and creative solutions are usually needed in any patient pharmacist interaction not directly related to what drug is dispensed/ how to take it. Creative aspects of art are also very useful in pharmaceutical research since creativity is necessary to conceptualize how a potential drug would need in order to treat a specific condition

Claim sentence 3: It is important that a strong foundation of science underlies the artistic aspects used by pharmacists because the scientifically proven best way to treat someone must take priority over making treatment convenient for a patient, there are laws of drugs that must not be broken for any reason or else the health and life of a patient will be put at risk and it is crucial that these laws and as an extension of these laws, the scientific process, as an immovable foundation to their practice.

Both Pinker and Lehrer agree that reductionalism isn’t the perfect system to understand all of the world around us. In Lehrer’s publication “The future of science … is art?” Lehrer remarks that “The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym.” which is basically saying that you need an artistic thinker or way of thought to reach certain truths, especially about the mind, that a reductionalist approach could never achieve. Pinker brings his own explanation of why reductionalism isn’t the be all end all in his publication “science is not your enemy” where he explains the ridiculousness of using reductionalism as a master key by saying “No sane thinker would try to explain World War 1 in the language of physics, chemistry, and biology as opposed to the more perspicuous language of the perceptions and goals of leaders in 1914 Europe”. This quote illustrates the ridiculousness of trying to explain things as a sum of their fundamental parts as an example of how unrealistic and inefficient it would be to explain the cause for a war with the fundamental laws of nature as opposed to the political  climate of the time. Both Pinker and Lehrer concur that reductionalism is an idea that we can’t rely on as much as many people think they can and that we should instead take a more wholistic approach to some problems.

Finding truth from science is a long and difficult process due to the disconnect between what we perceive and are likely to believe and what is true in the universe. Steven Pinker weighs in on this issue by saying “The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions.”. In this quote he says that by nature the laws of nature are things hidden from the perceiving methods we as humans have evolved especially for survival and that there is a lot of things in our nature that we have to overcome in able to find truth in science. For example one truth in nature that wasn’t easily detectable to us as humans was the nature of light. The nature of light for one wasn’t obvious because what we perceive as light is only a small fraction of the wavelengths of light that exist and other forms of light like radio waves and gamma waves still aren’t thought of as “light” to many laypeople even is places where higher education is readily available. The nature of light as both a wave and a particle has baffled us for a long time and is still a hard concept for a lot of people to grasp due to the human mind not being designed to think in that way. Many in the science fields including Pinker can attest to how difficult it can be to overcome the disconnect between the reality of nature and the subjective nature of us as humans.