The idea for my paper, “Altruism in Hypothetical and Statistical Situations,” originated from one of my reading journals. In this reading journal, I identified that Hardin’s and Singer’s essays are similar in that both discuss the ethical issue of altruism by constructing hypothetical situations that can be applied to real-life situations, but they are very different in their perspectives of the act of altruism. This observation inspired me to examine the practicality of the examples constructed in their essays. To have a more comprehensive analysis, I inspected their use of statistics and found the potential issues I could work with.

During my writing process, I had a problem in separating the main ideas into points of suitable length. My professor suggested that I divide my main ideas into two larger points, hypothetical examples and statistical data, and then divide each larger point into two smaller points. After confirming the structure for the essay, I added a naysayer to each point. In the first few drafts of my essay, my discussion was not explicit enough. I revised by introducing the metaphors and hypothetical scenarios mentioned by the two articles more specifically, refining my topic sentences, and adding more connections between sentences. In this way, I finally made my essay clearer and more concise.

YIYANG CHEN is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, majoring in Economics and Mathematics. She is one of the founders and the president of the Boston University Chinese Music Ensemble. She would like to partially dedicate the publication of this paper to her writing professor, Jennifer Sia, who has given her a lot of valuable advice on writing.