Feature Article Blogpost

For the last few weeks in RLA and Health, we have been working on making a feature article. Throughout the making of our articles, we have chose a topic, developed a slant (or opinion on the topic), researched, had a design lesson with Ms Dowd, and designed our article.

Over the past weeks, my topic and slant changed quite a bit. My original topic was sleep and how it related to stress, but after attempting to research this topic, I couldn’t find any sources. This made me change my topic to sleep deprivation. Now, I had to develop a slant. My first slant was about the negative effects of sleep deprivation. But I felt that it wasn’t specific enough to make my article unique and stand out from the others. I thought about making my slant more specific, and using the knowledge I already had, I broke the negative effects into two parts: physical health and mental health. I chose to focus my article on how sleep deprivation negatively affects teenagers’ physical health, but then I realized I was more interested in researching about the negative effects on teenagers’ mental health. So then I changed my slant to how sleep deprivation negatively affects teenager’s mental health. That was the last change.

My researching process was fairly simple. My sources were from Webpath Express, a research engine, which can be found on the SAS library website. For the note taking, I used a three column chart. The first column was the source information, the second column was the notes itself, and the third column was the analysis, where I analyze how the notes relate to the article. On top of that, I highlighted my notes to organize my data even further. Each color represented a topic. Here are the colors I used:

Yellow: Related to Mental Health/Behavior Slant

Green: Sleep Hours, Facts & Percentages
Blue: Solutions

Orange: Causes
Red: Domain Specific Language

After the researching process came the drafting. There isn’t much of a process when it came to drafting, so I’ll skip that and move on to designing my article. Before designing our articles we had a lesson with Ms Dowd about design. I learned that an article has to have multiple columns and all the images have to fit each of the columns. For example, an image can be one column wide, two columns wide, etc. But it can’t be one and a half columns, etc. Also, I learned that there is a drop caps in every article at the beginning or introduction. A drop caps is when the first letter in a paragraph is bigger than the rest. Finally, I learned that you should use a color pallet and be repetitive with the colors in your article. When I say repetitive, I mean sticking with it for the entire article and making it a pattern. Like all the subheadings will be green and all the body text will be black.