For my final draft of my significant writing project, I chose my multimodal essay. My multimodal essay titled “How Beauty Makes You Happier and Healthier” uses multiple diverse sources including two podcasts, one essay by John Armstrong, and an article that speaks to the positive mental health effect that beauty has on your brain. I used these sources in multiple different ways to further and strengthen my argument. One of these ways was putting in links to the podcasts I used as sources when I talked about them in my essay. Another was to quote Armstrong and Goddard (author of the article about mental health and beauty.) For example, in my essay one of my quotes about Goddard’s idea of nature being at the core of beauty was, “Any discussion of beauty has to begin with the natural world.” I then went on to explain this quote by stating, “I interpret this as beauty and nature go hand in hand, so if you want to experience beauty, a great place to start is with nature.” Luckily, our class went over lots of different ways you can work with sources and I now know how to properly integrate quotes into my arguments thanks to the extensive lessons we had. My early efforts to do so resulted quite poorly and I would drop quotes in without an explanation as to how they are relevant. Now after having thorough lessons on how to do so sufficiently, I feel much more confident with this process.
