During the first week of class, I have become more familiar with Scholar and the format of the online lectures and discussions. The lectures introduced the idea that communicability is a broad term that can be applied to many conditions outside the umbrella of “infectious diseases.” This caused me to try to determine what causes some conditions to be communicable and others not to be. I identified empathy as a big factor in why stress, smoking, and other bad habits can be communicable. After reading my peers’ posts and responses to my post, I also agree now that urbanization is a communicable phenomenon. When people begin to move to more urban places, the social aspect of human nature drives other people to do the same thing. Reading my peers’ posts allowed me to analyze the issues in new light and develop new opinions on whether or not the conditions posed to us were communicable. I really enjoyed seeing everyone’s individual perspective and support for their arguments.

For this week, I mainly used empathy as my support for why a condition is or is not communicable, which I think limited my argument and definition of communicability. In the future, I will try to identify more than one supporting piece of evidence so that my argument is better supported. I will also try to look at future issues from more than one perspective even before reading my peers’ posts to try to strengthen my argument and my understanding of the materials presented in lectures.