40 Additional Activities: Paths to Mental Health
Learning Outcomes
- Connect ideas from different texts with each other.
- Analyze the use of cause and effect in academic writing.
- Analyze the use of description in academic writing.
- Analyze the types of evidence used in academic writing.
- Evaluate the sources used in an academic article.
This chapter contains additional reading and writing activities related to the articles in Themed Texts: Paths to Mental Health.
Making Connections
Both Ari Honarvar (Amid Travel Ban, Refugee Women Cope With Trauma and Stress Through Drum Circles) and Morgan Florsheim (Don’t Tell Me to Despair about the Climate: Hope Is a Right We Must Protect) write about the need to find healing amid trauma. Honarvar discusses refugees’ use of drumming to process and heal from trauma. Florsheim discusses the collective trauma her generation has experienced because they were born into a world in crisis environmentally.
Reread the two articles. Respond to the following questions.
- Imagine a conversation between these two writers. What do you think they would say to each other? Explain your thinking.
- What could the refugee women in Honarvar’s article learn from Florsheim’s experience?
- What could Florsheim and her generation learn from the experiences of refugee women whom Honarvar describes?
Rhetorical Methods
Analyzing Cause and Effect
When writers want to analyze why something happened or the outcome of some occurrence, they are using cause and effect. When examining causes, they focus on the reasons behind some outcome or result, answering the question, “Why did this happen?” When writers address effects, they present the consequences or results of some cause. A writer may choose to examine only causes, only effects, or both causes and effects in a text.
In The Lifesaving Power of Gratitude (or, Why You Should Write That Thank You Note), Richard Gunderman discusses the positive effects of showing gratitude.
In How Small Acts of Kindness Can Make You Happier and Healthier, Meena Andiappan writes about how people experience positive effects when they show kindness to others.
Finally, in Why Does Experiencing ‘Flow’ Feel So Good? A Communication Scientist Explains, Richard Huskey examines both the causes and effects of flow.
Choose one of the articles. Make a list of the causes and effects that the writer identifies. Then, analyze and evaluate the writing using the following questions as a guide:
- Is each cause-effect relationship clearly explained?
- Is there sufficient evidence to explain the link to each cause and effect? If not, what additional evidence would you like to have seen?
- Does the writer cover all the major causes and effects? Are there any that the writer overlooked and should have included?
You may also choose to evaluate two of the articles (or all three of them, if you are feeling ambitious) and decide which writer did the best job of presenting causes and effects.
Analyzing Evidence
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