Robertson 1

Aidan Robertson

Writing 2

Mx. Pennington

March 17, 2023

WP 1 Reflection

Last quarter, I took an upper division Environmental Studies class called Water Supply

and Demand. We learned about the water we use, where it comes from, and which sectors use it

the most. The lectures that always captivated me were ones on groundwater: the water stored

beneath our feet. After finding out that, in Writing 2, I could work with any academic article, I

knew I wanted to translate something relating to groundwater, so I could explore this topic on my

own and learn more about our relationship with groundwater, specifically in California. Having a

basic understanding of groundwater, how we use it, and how it is managed is important, and I

wanted to make this information more accessible to other UCSB students. Groundwater

management is very state-specific, so it’s important to be aware of your own state’s policies and

issues.

I selected the article “Domestic Well Vulnerability to Drought Duration and Unstable

Groundwater Management in California’s Central Valley” by R A Pauloo, et al. as the article I

was going to translate because it spoke in depth on the topic I was interested in. The article is

meant to inform hydrogeologists and policymakers, so it centers on a data-driven model

estimating the amount of well failures that would occur should another long term drought occur

in California, based on differing groundwater management practices.

Because the article I chose was so science-heavy, I wanted to translate it into a genre that

would be easy to understand, but still be able to convey a lot of information. With UCSB
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students as my target audience, I imagined my translation being something a student could pick

up all around campus, so my genre also needed to be something that could be easily reproduced

and distributed. There are many genres that are easy to photocopy and distribute, but one stuck

out to me - a zine. A zine is a self-published print with striking graphics, like a tiny magazine,

that tend to focus on one very specific topic. As Kerry Dirk mentions in “Navigating Genres”,

when you write, you need to be aware of the freedom you have within your chosen genre, along

with its purpose, audience, and context (Dirk 261). I had already determined my purpose,

audience, and context, so all I had to do was assess the limitations of my genre and how much

room I had to explore. Since zines are a very open-ended, ranging from almost entirely words to

only images, I had the freedom to decide exactly what I wanted my zine to look like. When I

looked more specifically at science zines, I found they often included a healthy mix of both

striking imagery and text explaining their specific science concept. I decided to follow a similar

format, so I could still include the information I wanted to, but not have it be overwhelming.

Reading this article was difficult, but efficiently annotating allowed me to work through

it and decipher what was really important to me from what I could ignore for this project. After I

read through my article a few times, I broke it into it’s bare essentials to determine its most

important takeaways. Because a large portion of the methods section focused on how they built

their model, I decided to exclude it entirely from my translation. I mostly looked at the

introduction, results, and discussion sections, because they contained the messages I wanted to

include. I gathered statistics on groundwater usage during drought years compared to average

years, impacts of three different groundwater management systems, and a graph comparing those

models. These elements all made it fairly directly into my zine, with some minor changes to fit

the genre conventions.

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The graph illustrating the impact of three different groundwater management systems

changed the most from my article to my zine. On one page of my zine, I included the entire

graph to show how each model compares to the others. On the next page, I split the graph into

three separate graphs for each model, showing a separation between each type. This allowed me

to describe each model by itself, and list the impacts of each one on groundwater levels. The

results were a summary compiled by taking information from all throughout the article, to get a

full picture of each model.

One detail I debated over including with the graphs was the predicted amount of well

failures for each model. This was because, while the article I translated used data from the

Central Valley, my zine didn’t focus too much on the location. In the end, I decided that

including the numbers added another level of comparison between the three models. Seeing the

Total Sustainability model resulting in around 2,000 well failures in comparison to

Business-as-Usual’s 10,500 is striking. Those numbers next to their respective model’s graph

also gave context to how groundwater levels affect wells. The simple but effective comparison

made it so any UCSB student could pick up my zine and immediately understand how different

the three models were from one another, and what kind of impact they would have on

groundwater.

In my first draft, I initially struggled a lot with the organization of the first page of my

zine. I had tried to use both pages to my advantage, but the layout was cluttered and confusing.

As I made more revisions, I realized the two-page spread I was trying to use wouldn’t work out

with the type of information I was using, so each page ended up separate from the others. The

feedback I received from peer review helped me figure out the best way to restructure the

elements on these pages in a way that supported the flow of the zine and increased its readability.
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One of the most challenging parts of this project was deciphering what I knew from what

I could expect an average UCSB student to know. When I started breaking my article into its

basics, I realized the article described processes that wouldn’t make sense without a

preestablished understanding of how wells affect groundwater. It was drawn out and hard to

follow. To me, it made sense that an extended drought, through many processes, would lead to

thousands of homes with dry wells. But when I thought about how other students would read

this, I knew I would have to change how I presented the information. Kara Taczak’s article

helped me work through this problem the best. She writes that, “each writing situation is unique

and requires its own individual and specific response” (Taczak 307). This is in relation to the

idea that writing is not one size fits all. Knowledge is not one size fits all, either. I needed to

curate a baseline of knowledge, before expanding on more complex ideas. I followed this

principle as I designed me zine, so I broke my ideas and knowledge into bite sized chunks that

followed a linear pathway.

Though translating “Domestic Well Vulnerability to Drought Duration and Unsustainable

Groundwater Management in California’s Central Valley” into a zine was a difficult task, I was

able to create something I was genuinely proud of. It helped me understand that academia isn’t

fully out of reach for me or others, and that even complex things can be made simple when you

understand their rhetorical situation. Things like management systems can seem complicated at a

first glance, but breaking them down into their most basic parts and adjusting the way it’s makes

can make it much more accessible to others.

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Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 1, Edited by

Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 249-262.

Pauloo, R A, et al. “Domestic Well Vulnerability to Drought Duration and Unsustainable

Groundwater Management in California’s Central Valley.” Environmental Research Letters, vol.

15, no. 4, 18 Mar. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab6f10.

Taczak, Kara. “The Importance of Transfer in Your First Year Writing Course.” Writing Spaces

4, pp. 301-311.