Explaining my train of thought
Starting with the first paragraph, in both my technical explanation and my generalized explanation I decided to lead by discussing the global impact of coronary heart disease. I feel that by showing the disease’s immense effect worldwide is a way of immediately establishing the importance of the article, which is helpful for any kind of writing. In the first paragraph of the teaching post, I made sure to really break down the scientific terms so that they would be more easily understood. For example, when speaking to a scientifically savvy community, I can assume that they know what an artery is and that it supplies blood rather than drains it. But when speaking to a more general audience, I took a sentence to describe the function of an artery specifically in regards to the heart.
When describing plaque buildup, I created an analogy that I thought any person could easily understand. Seeing as the collection of plaque is a slow accumulation on the walls of the arteries, I thought it might make sense to relate it to a traffic accident on the freeway. As the majority of readers will have had some experience with driving in traffic, they’ll be able to visualize the reluctance of flow after a multiple car collision. By equating the clotting factors (cholesterol and cellular waste) to cars, the average reader can then imagine how the clot builds over time and leaves less room for the blood to flow through the vessel, just as traffic makes it difficult for cars to travel down the freeway. This analogy creates a simple, and easily relatable vision for readers to understand a widely misunderstood medical complication. I created a second analogy when describing blood clots as I compared their effects to that of a band aid. Similar to the traffic comparison, I wanted to give the readers an easily understood concept in order to simplify a complicated system within the body.
For both articles, I wanted to provide a clinical application for the warning signs of a heart attack, namely shoulder/arm pain. For the technical post, I provided a more detailed explanation for the reasoning behind this phenomenon called referred pain. I included words such as “vertebral column” and “motor neurons” as these are both concepts generally understood in the scientific community. However, I felt it unnecessary to explain in such depth for the more generalized post, and therefore summed up this same process in only one sentence without the use of so much jargon. Though I did lose some of the content with this strategy, I felt that the detail wasn’t totally necessary for the overall understanding of coronary heart disease. Though for science-minded people, knowing about the neuronal make up of sensory stimulation would be valuable information regarding application in a clinical setting, and therefore worth including. I used a similar technique when explaining the process of a stroke. In the first post, I described specific arteries (carotid and ascending aorta) involved with strokes in order to give a more exact explanation, whereas the generalized post only noted that these arteries were going to the brain rather than to the heart. Lastly, when describing chronic inflammation in response to diabetes and obesity, the first post included specific proteins involved in the process, whereas the second post was again much more general. Overall, the majority of the content was preserved from the technical post to the teaching post, only with fewer scientific words (to avoid distraction/confusion) and with more analogies to better help the general reader to understand these body systems.
