Kailah Korsh
Writing 2
Prof. Zack De Piero
WP3: Using Music to Help Recovery
Older translation: click here
Younger translation: click here, here and here. (first is a picture of the app, next is an overview of all pages on app, last is the textual page. You may have to zoom in on pictures)
Summary
The scholarly article that I chose, Music Attenuated a Decrease in Parasympathetic Nervous System Activity after Exercise, was written by members of the Department of Internal Medicine and Rehabilitation science at Tohoku University in Japan. The article investigates the relationship between music and the autonomic nervous system activity after exercise. The article uses the IMRAD organizational form to talk about a study. Researches carried out a study in which 26 subjects participated in four randomly chosen sessions throughout four different days of a control session, a biking session, a music session, and a biking with music session. Researchers wanted to find out the autonomic nervous system activity varied during all four sessions. The autonomic nervous system was operationalized, or measured, by monitoring the subjects’ heart rates during each session. The study found data that suggests music increases parasympathetic nerve activity after exercising. This is important because the increased activity in the parasympathetic nervous system helps muscles with rehabilitation, leading to a faster recovery and decrease in cardiac stress.
Reflection
For my WP3, I really wanted to write about some aspect of music, because that is one of my biggest interests. I thought it would be interesting to investigate an article that showed a relationship between music and the brain or music and the body. I found a scholarly article called Music Attenuated a Decrease in Parasympathetic Nervous System Activity after Exercise, which contains the kind of information that I was originally looking for. This article’s main idea is ultimately that there is a surprising relationship between music and the Parasympathetic Nervous System, which reveals that music could help people have a faster recovery after working out. Using this main idea, I transformed my article into two pieces that inform different groups to whom this information would be relevant. I picked adults from age 40 to 50 years old, and high school kids. I took into consideration “the different social spaces that affect how we communicate, what is said and what is not said,” in order to translate my pieces to reach these new audiences (Losh and Alexander). To target the adults, I made an informational flyer that would be posted around and handed out at their gym. For the high school kids, I wanted to target athletes specifically, so I made an iphone app that would inform kids about and help them with their post workouts in order to prevent injury.
The first translation that I did—an app allowing people to monitor their heart rate while listening to music after a workout, and tracking the information gathered—is tailored to high school athletes. The exigence for this app is that high school athletes often work themselves to extremes and end up injured, which can drastically impact their future if they wanted to play sports in college of even afterwards. Many of my friends and acquaintances in high school had to completely change their college path and life plan after a bad injury. In order to address this exigence, I chose an iphone app because technology is very relevant to this age group. Three quarters or teens have access to smartphones, and the age group from 18-29 year olds are the most likely to partake in the use of smartphone apps (Lenhart and MarketingChart). Because high schoolers are aged from 14-18 years old, the platform of an iphone app is an effective way to reach them.
The aesthetics of the app were important in appealing to the chosen age group. The app itself is brightly colored, so that it does not seem too serious or boring. The layout is extremely straightforward, with one main home screen and four tabs on the bottom, titled “Music”, “HR” for heart rate, “Progress”, and “Info”. The directions for acquiring accurate heart rate information are also easy to follow because the home screen contains a message that says “place thumb here”, and a space for the thumb. This direction was a choice that I made to “add valuable information” and to “work well with the images around [the words]” to make the app straightforward (McCloud). In addition, the flow that I chose for the app pages reflects the app user’s priorities—music and heart rate first, and info page last. The kids will not be bombarded with hard-to-decipher information about the science behind why the music will help them recover more quickly because they may not have time to read about this or care that much. The aesthetics of the application reflect choices that I made about the layout and overall flow of the text, which aid in the application’s usability.
The moves that I made in order to transform the scholarly article mostly have to do with simplifying the information, and making it accessible for a younger audience. To do this, I simplified larger concepts by replacing scientific jargon with more easily understood language. For example, I replaced, “post-exercise parasympathetic reactivation appears to be an important mechanism with a cardioprotective effect in both healthy participants and patients with cardiovascular disease” with “this measurement gives us information about your Autonomic Nervous System activity, which plays an important role in cardiac health and your heart rate recovery after working out.” Without sacrificing important information, I still transformed the sentence to be more understandable to high-schoolers. I also took on a very conversational tone, so that kids of a high school age could relate to the writers of the app, rather than thinking of them as researchers who do not really know what teens need in their lives. I directly addressed the audience, and I also used conversational words and phrases such as “basically” and “it’s that simple!”. I made sure to “adjust my tone and voice to get the effect that I want” (Losh and Alexander). I also left out aspects of the study that would be irrelevant to high-schoolers, such as the methods and statistical analysis; I instead focused the results and parts from the introduction and discussion, to give the users the information that is most relevant to them.
The second translation that I did had some similarities to the first in terms of appealing to a non-academic audience, however it had many differences because it was tailored to an older audience who use trainers at a gym club. The exigence of this flyer is that adults can have difficulty finding time to work out, and maximizing the benefits from their time because they are extremely busy with work and possibly kids. However, this exigence applies to a large spectrum of adults. In order to narrow it down a little more, I chose adults aged 40-50, because they are not as agile as younger adults, however still tend to work out. Because of this, they are more susceptible to injury than younger adults, however still work out more than older adults. In response to this exigence, I created a flyer that explains how beneficial it can be to listen to certain music after working out in order to recover more quickly.
The flyer contains an address to those who should listen, that reads “Attention valuable customers”, as well as another notifier, which are then proceeded by a short info/summary paragraph. There are a few more background info paragraphs with titles—“Post Exercise Heart Rate Variability”, “Statistical Evidence”, “Why is this Important to you?”, and then a salutation. The information is broken up into five short sections, in order to give the readers the most important and relevant information about each background topic, and not overwhelm them by doing so. In addition to the reader-friendly layout of the flyer, the other aesthetics help the appeal as well. I deliberately chose a light green background for the flyer with black text in a plain font, because it seemed eye-catching, yet professional. I stayed away from any bright colors that would have appeared bombarding. In order to grab attention, I used a badge-shaped notifier that reads, “Important for all members!” This extra part of the flyer is intended to grab the attention of the adults, without sacrificing the seriousness of the message. The layout and salience of the flyer work together to reach out to adults, while still being taken seriously.
Most moves that I made were based on making the flyer concise and intriguing, while making the source seem credible. Each paragraph on the flyer is short—much shorter than the paragraphs in the scholarly article—because I extracted the main ideas that the adults at a gym club would care about, such as an explanation of what the parasympathetic nervous system is, and why exactly that is relevant to them. I left out a lot of irrelevant information from the scholarly article, such as the specific statistics, and some of the background info. I included selected information about the study, as well as the background info, in order to appeal to the readers’ ethos and gain credibility, while staying concise. For example, I summarized the sentence, “The frequency of HRV, which is obtained from HR using methods such as fast Fourier transform, autoregressive model and maximum entropy methods (MEM), contains two major components: a low-frequency power (LF; 0.04–0.15 Hz) and a high-frequency power (HF; 0.15–0.40 Hz),” into “Heart Rate Variability (HRV) can non-invasively be used to measure the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity.” This transformation altered the jargon to be less medical and more understandable, while still appearing knowledgeable. As mentioned in Writing Identities, “rhetoric is about presenting a character that an audience will trust.” The importance of this information in the flyer is to let the readers know that they can trust the information that is being given to them, while not overwhelming them. Throughout my flyer, I transformed the information from the scholarly article to create a balance between conciseness and in-depth, trusted information.
Overall, I used a professional, yet friendly tone throughout my flyer in order to be polite without transcending any boundaries with the customers. I used words like “valued customers,” and referred to the readers as “members,” in order to be polite and make them feel as though they are part of a caring community. Also, during the “Why is this relevant to you?” section, I took on a more conversational tone in order to relate to the members. For example, I started out with “I know that big words about the inner workings of your body may seem a little far fetched in terms of relevance to you.” This sentence takes away the sterile tone from talking about the study, and brings the flyer back down to being relatable to the member’s lives. It is extremely important to remember that your tone “should engage your audience in a way that will invite them to feel receptive to your messages” (Losh and Alexander). Incorporating a friendly tone into a flyer that contains important medical information was a very significant part of my appeal to the adults.
Writing my WP3 meant experimenting with different identities that I took on in order to reach different audiences. Appealing to audiences who are as different as middle-aged adults and high-school kids meant completely changing not only what I said, but how I said it. I enjoyed this project a lot because it allowed me to be creative with content, delivery, and even the visual aspects that go into every writing piece. From the relatable, fun and friendly tone I took on in the iphone app translation, to the polite and knowledgeable person I became in the second translation, I learned how drastically writing changes based on the exigence and audience that are being addressed.
Works Cited
Jia, Tiantian, et al. "Music Attenuated A Decrease In Parasympathetic Nervous System Activity After Exercise." Plos ONE 11.2 (2016): 1-12. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 May 2016.
Lenhart, Amanda. Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015. Pew Research Center Internet Science Tech RSS. N.p., 2015. Web. 28 May 2016.
Losh, Elizabeth M., Jonathan Alexander, Kevin Cannon, and Zander Cannon. Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Scott McCloud | Journal » Archive » Writing with Pictures. Scott McCloud Journal RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 May 2016.
Young Adults Lead Mobile App Use. MarketingCharts. N.p., 2010. Web. 28 May 2016.
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