Hello World Essay

Submitted By littleliar_123
Words: 1031
Pages: 5

The moves and ways that an author decides to write a paper plays a big role in how the reader perceives it. The author of the article How Inactivity Changes the Brain, Gretchen Reynolds says why not having an active life is bad for human beings. By not being active it can change the shape of the brain and also cause other diseases. Gretchen Reynolds proves these points by writing an article using rhetorical choices such as language, structure of the essay and transition words and phrases.
One of the moves that this author uses in this article is the language. Gretchen Reynolds uses a very sophisticated language in this article. She uses a lot of medical terms that are not easy to understand for a normal reader who does not know anything about medical terms. Two of the words that she uses in the essay are sedentary and neurons. In the article Reynolds wrote this sentence, “The study, which was conducted in rats but likely has implications for people too, the researchers say, found that being sedentary changes the shape of certain neurons in ways that significantly affect not just the brain but the heart as well” (Reynolds 1). One of the words is sedentary and it means accustomed to sit or rest a great deal or to take little exercise. The other word she used was neurons and it means a specialized, impulse-conducting cell that is the functional unit of the nervous system, consisting of the cell body and its processes. If someone were to read this exactly the way it is they would probably be clueless on what the sentence might mean. Reynolds could have written the sentence in a way that a regular reader would have understood it. By explaining what those two words mean it would make it easier for anyone who is not as educated as her. A reason why the author might have used these words might have been because since this article was based on a research she wanted the reader to know that what she was saying was credible. When someone read this essay they will think of the author that she is a very well educated person and that she know what she is talking about.
Another great move that Reynolds has in this article is the structure of the whole essay. She starts of by mentioning that there are other studies that have been done that show that exercise can remodel the brain by creating new brain cells and that now inactivity can also change the brain. Then she says, “So for a study recently published in The Journal of Comparative Neurology, scientists at Wayne State University School of Medicine and other institutions gathered a dozen rats. They settled half of them in cages with running wheels and let the animals run at will. Rats like running, and these animals were soon covering about three miles a day on their wheels” (Reynolds 1). When she says this she is helping the reader understand what is going on. The way that she structured this article was certainly affective because when the reader starts they can immediately see that there have been similar studies made and they have drawn an amount of conclusion. As they go on they will be able to see that this is a credible study because it was performed at Wayne State University School of Medicine. Reynolds did an exceptional job at organizing this essay because the way it is structured it is easy to pick up her main points and ideas. This way the reader will not be lost during the reading and will be able to keep up and keep track of what they are reading. In the same way that Reynolds used the first two moves effectively, she also used the move of using transition words. When authors use transitions they use them to elaborate more in their argument, moreover they use it to connect or link a paragraph to another or a sentence to