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Andrew Xu

6/10/23

Lopatko

WRIT 2

Sleep Better, Do Better

Sometimes I wonder if I slept earlier, would I have passed that test, remembered

the lessons in class, or been able to stay awake during it. I always asked myself if it was

worth it to stay up an extra hour or should I have gone to sleep. Getting a good night of

sleep in college is hard because I am always stressed about something. This is a

common occurrence among my peers too. After doing some research, I found the

answer. “Sleep Problems in University Students - An Intervention” by Angelika Anita

Schlarb, Anja Friedrich, and Merle Claben is an article about college students using the

SWIS sleep training method.

The SWIS sleep training method is a group treatment that is six sessions long.

During these sessions, you will learn about healthy sleeping habits, sleeping-promoting

living arrangements, sleep rituals, cognitive restructuring, stress management,

problem-solving skills, and muscle relaxation. The article was published on July 26,

2017 and it belongs to the Psychology and Sports department. The intended audience

of this article is for people who are interested in neuroscience. SWIS stands for

“Studieren wie im Schlaf” which means “studying in your sleep” in english.

The main claim of this article is that SWIS training improves students'

performance in school. The SWIS training showed that students who participated in the
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treatment had an increase in their GPA, were able to stay awake during the day, and

learned better in class. Neuroscientists would find this article useful because it explains

how this method works through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) and

Hypnotherapy for Insomnia (HT-I). SWIS was tested against another sleep training

method called the Taylor et al. The SWIS treatment had more impact on the students

such as less night wakings, and better sleep. The Taylor et al was designed to only treat

people with insomnia, while the SWIS sleep training treated people with irregular sleep,

insomnia, and more. The patients used a Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index which is a

self-assessment questionnaire to report how much SWIS affected them. The

participants used a sleeping log to track how many times they woke up in the middle of

the night, and the numbers reduced after SWIS. Before the study, people reported that

they have sleeping problems, but after the training, their sleeping improved.

Another audience that could use this article is college students. This article is

about a study on college students. The study shows that SWIS is impactful for students,

so they can use it to help them perform better in school. The SWIS training is very

effective for university students because it improves their well-being. A lot of students

deal with mental health issues and having better sleep could help you. I believe every

student wants to do better in school and live a healthy life. I showed this article to my

friends and they found it very interesting.

A genre that I can use to reach this audience is a brochure. It’s a good fit for

students because they are simple and easy to understand. Brochures are so small, so I

can only put the most important information on it. They allow you to make difficult

concepts really easy to understand. By putting the information into graphs and charts,
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they are able to visualize what happens. I am making the brochure tailored towards

college students since they are interested in this topic. The main goal of my translation

is to show how SWIS sleep training works and why it is useful.

A challenge I had when translating the article is making the information aimed

towards college students. In the article, there were a bunch of scientific terms that

explained what SWIS sleep training was. It took me a while to figure out what it meant.

According to Cali Sullivan, “During the process of translating, one of the things I kept in

mind was that the “Translation should be to the point and easily understandable to

recreational SCUBA divers. I made sure that any medical or scholarly terminology that

could cause confusion was filtered out or replaced.”(Sullivan 91). This quote helped me

translate the information from the article onto the brochure. There’s a lot of scientific

information about how SWIS works, but it wouldn’t be interesting for the intended

audience. The information I put on the brochure is very simple that anyone could

understand.

Throughout the writing process I learned how to identify different genres and how

to write to a specific audience. There were many different genres I could have used to

translate the article, but the brochure was the most effective way to convey the

information. During the first weeks of school, we learned how to write to specific

audiences like a friend, family member, or teacher. It is important to know who you are

writing to because there's information you will need to include, so your audience

understands what you’re trying to say. For every audience, there is a different way to

say something. If you are talking to a friend, you do not have to be so formal, but if

you’re talking to your teacher, you have to. I’ll remember these lessons throughout the
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rest of this course. According to Mike Bunn, “Reading like a writer can help you

understand how the process of writing is a series of making choices, and in doing so,

can help you recognize important decisions you might face and techniques you might

want to use when working on your own writing.” (Bunn 75). Looking at other writers'

writing, I used some of their techniques and incorporated them into my own. I used

Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” to help me with my writings. He talks about how we should

not worry about what we are writing about in the beginning, just get your ideas down. I

usually have trouble starting writing, so this really helps me.

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Works Cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Starting Lines Writing Spaces: Readings on

Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charley Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 2011, pp. 75.

Sullivan, Cali. “Scuba Dive: Going Deeper”, pp. 91.