How to Write a Personal Definition of Health

1. How to Write a Personal Definition of Health Combining the Personal and the Definitive in a meaningful way

2. Contents • Assignment Outline • Rubric • Critiquing Definitions • Brainstorming your own • Organizing the Paper • Titles

3. Assignment Outline • Personal Definition of Health Assignment (15%) Your personal definition of health will be a three-page reflection of your thoughts, perspectives and/or experiences that have or are influencing your current personal definition of health. Further information will be provided during Week 2 regarding the criteria for completing this assignment. Your personal definition of health is due in seminar (Week 6)

4. Assignment Rubric

5. Assignment Rubric cont.

6. Critiquing Definitions • Find all the health definitions from the readings • Put them in groupings (How can they be categorized? Engage in close-reading of its structure) • Critique each one (find strengths and weaknesses) • Start to think about what an ideal definition would include

7. Critiquing cont. • Health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. (WHO) • Health is a “resource for daily life”. Health allows us to "to realize aspirations and satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment…Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources as well as physical capacities”. (OTHP)

8. Critiquing cont. • “Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health.” (BC) • “The condition of being well or free from disease; the overall condition of someone's body or mind; the condition or state of something” (Merriam-Webster) • Old English hǣlth, of Germanic origin; related to whole (Oxford Dictionary)

9. Brainstorming your own Definition From Professor’s lecture this week: • What is important to you in terms of health? • Brainstorm ideas, words, pictures • Reflect on some of the concepts we have discussed • Holistic? Supportive environments? Individual resilience? Healthy lifestyles? Health promotion/disease prevention? • Draft and share your definition – discuss/debate/defend! • Compare and contrast with the concepts in the readings • Share your personal journey to this definition – which experiences have influenced you?

10. Organizing the Paper • What are the ‘parts’ of this paper? • What are some ways to organize these parts? • What do you definitely need to include? • What should you avoid?

11. Creating a Declarative Title • Your title should be declarative: A declarative title states or asserts something; in a research paper, this might be a statement of main research findings or conclusions; in context of this assignment, this might be a main statement concluding the student's definition of health (e.g. the scope/breadth/main point of their definition)

12. Title cont. • In order to make sure it is declarative of your focus and definition, write it at the end, after you have written everything • Make sure it matches up with the wording you have used in your definition

13. Titles Some examples from this course: • Re-imagining the 'social' in the nutrition sciences • A lifecourse perspective: Understanding food choices in time, social location and history • Sanitary Science and Home Economics 1880-1930 • Introduction to Professional Practice

14. Titles • Titles should also be creative • Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics 1880-1930 • Introduction to Professional Practice: Passion, Portals & Pie

15. Titles • Use the colon to help organize the title’s parts • Creative: Declarative (or visa versa, mix-it up, or drop the colon)