Working and Researching

3/29/2021

This past week I continued to work on my draft of the final product. At first I intended to edit parts of the passages I had wrote beforehand but I had to scrap alto of my previous work because most of it came off as robotic and factual rather than personal and empathetic to those who suffer from migraines. I wrote about my personal experiences with my mother sufferings from migraines and how it has affected my life. I also reflected upon my own bias and stigma against migraines towards both myself and my mother. During this writing period, I quickly realized I needed to research more on how to effectively write an opinion-piece by allowing my own experiences to creating its line of reasoning and using data-driven evidence as only secondary sources. I read an article by Susan Shapiro, a journalist who regularly writes for columnists. In the article she empathized the need to formulate a link between yourself and the subject at hand and being very opinionated throughout the entire piece. I also learnt to play devil's advocate and make sure to add facts that are surprised or unknown for the audience. The most critical part of writing an opinion piece which I learnt from this article was understanding my voice such as "Aniket Hingnekar is a young man on the verge of graduating High School and has been surrounded with Migraine his entire life, afflicting both his mother and grandfather." I must show my own credentials when addressing this issue to help the reader believe in my hard-truth statements.