Reflection Essay

I guess I should start off my reflection essay by discussing a little about why i chose the topic before i get into the particular constructs and other materials I recently learned in class. When I chose to do my topic i looked at major psychology disorders in the start and stub class wikipedia topics. This came in major handy when finding a topic because of the lack of material covered within these topics. I decided to go with Sleep Terror Disorder and based my data off of the DSM-IV TR which is one of the most informative pieces of literature when looking up psychological disorders.  During my wikipedia edit I found it hard to find verifiable source material for my topic that I covered that was not already in the DSM. Most importantly towards the end of my edit I realized this shortened my editing power significantly.

As I was editing i noticed many important topics discussed in class started to appear. A good example was the "Shitty First Drafts" article by Anne Lamott. As she clearly put when a first draft is done it becomes tedious and tiring when trying to write the second and final drafts. I experienced this after looking at many sources and writing down as much as I could in the first draft just to have so much information to meet the word quota. However, in my second draft, as well as final, I found that all this information was so overwhelming that it made me want to just drop the whole subject completely. After so many revisions it came down to realizing that all the information from my sources where meaningless. Had I not done this i would have not came to this conclusion and perhaps put information on the wiki edit that would have been disinformation.

Another instance of a topic was the idea of Donald M. Murrays' "All Writing is Autobiography" and the wikipedia guidelines of what is proper to edit.  Wikipedia makes it clear that they do not want any false, non-credible, or opinionated material on the site. They do this with internal editors within the company. Since this is true it is hard to believe Murray and his claim that everyone should be speaking from their own personal views. This holds true for me considering all of my editing information about Sleep Terror Disorder came straight from the DSM only in my own words.

When editing my Wikipedia page I was concerned about a certain part of the material that I was going to put in and it was mainly because of the content that was in it. It had to deal with differential diagnosis. Basically, all that means is that there are other disorders that are closely related through symptoms  but are not Sleep Terror Disorders. The reason I did not put this information in my edit was because the information was more about the other disorders rather than my topic and I thought Wikipedia would frown upon information that did not relate to Sleep Terror Disorder. 

I should also mention that I found the information we learned in class over rhetor and audience was useful when writing my edit. I felt that the original edit was a little disorganized and chunks of information were either missing or misplaced. As a “rhetor” I realized there could be some confusion within the audience and took this relationship into account and spent most of my time not finding new information to throw in but instead make it better for the audience to understand. I think this could possibly be another reason why my word count was so low. In my experience I look on Wikipedia sometimes for help on definitions for psychology. When I look these definitions up a am looking for straightforward details that slowly gravitate upward in difficulty of understanding. However, eventually I would just become bombarded with more and more words that I wouldn’t understand. Because of this fact I kept out some information and word uses that the DSM uses to avoid confusion to those that are not psychology majors or experts.

In summary, I am disappointed that my word count was low and I do accept that it was low, but in my experience making edits of the page if I would have added more the information would have either been repeated or would have been loosely related to the topic.