This week’s artifact is definitely the cause and effect research paper. I have worked on this paper so much this week! I can honestly say that I have never worked harder on any paper than I have on this one. This paper has showed me a new sense of dedication that was required to finished this paper. First off, I had put off starting my paper until last weekend because I assumed that 2000 wouldn’t take me too longer to write. Then, after I had two body paragraphs written, I accidentally deleted my paper and all of my work. So, after a brief moment of aggravation and several minutes yelling into a pillow, I began working again. I set a goal on Sunday that each day of this week I would write a minimum of 400 words a day. I can say that I bested that goal everyday by a pretty good bit. I had 7 pretty good sources from the annotated bibliographies and could have probably gotten by with just using those, but I pushed through the awfulness of citations and added about of dozen more sources. This paper literally made me scream. I wanted to quit this paper more than I have ever wanted to quit before. I have learned a lot about education in Mississippi as well as the writing process. I also learned a few more reasons not to procrastinate including that once you finally get started, you might have to start all over again due to an act of God, so start early in case that happens.
PowToon Unit Reflection
The differences in composing the multimodal project versus the actual paper were astronomical. At first I thought that it would be easy to make the video, especially since I had already written an argument paper on the exact same subject. I immediately regretted that thought. I have felt out of place many times this semester, but during this particular unit I felt like a fish out of water, especially while recording the sound track. I am not the kind of person that enjoys talking, so imagine my reaction when Mrs. Forgette told us that we had to record at least three straight minutes of our voices. I absolutely hated recording the audio track. The Sunday before the first audio draft was due, I sat in my room for over an hour talking to myself like a complete idiot. The worst part wasn’t the actual recording, but the part after where you had to listen to it over and over until you wanted to throw your laptop against the wall in disgust. The images were a breeze for me compared to the audio. In less than two hours, I had composed nearly all of the visual elements and had fun brainstorming ideas of what could come next. After that, I felt as if my calling were to work for Disney. My favorite part of the visual track is from the screenshot above. I love how it incorporates the biggest statistics of my paper, while truly connecting with the audience. The little guy on the far left is portraying the college students getting assaulted on campus, but he is actually supposed to be typing.
To say that I am inexperienced with visual presentations would be an understatement. Before this semester, I never made a PowerPoint, or a Prezi, or anything to the nature of PowToon. When I started the project, I knew that I had to jump right into the deep end and find the ins and outs of PowToon. The hardest part of the design process was the audio track. I didn’t want my the audio to be stop and go; I wanted it to flow! I decided to record the audio all at once, which led an excessive amount of time to be spent on timing the slides. My favorite design choice was actually something that I hated at the beginning – the template. Of course, I wanted one of the premium templates because they were so appealing to the eye, but I started off choosing the black and white template from above. I didn’t think that I would continue to use this template throughout the paper, but merely used it as a starting point. Over the course of the design process, I started to like how it looked and how it represented the paper. There weren’t any colors, other than the red that I used on certain fonts, which allowed me to portray the “black & white” seriousness of underage drinking. This is a very serious subject and I don’t think that bright happy colors would have been a great fit.
I wrote three drafts of my script that were honestly the worst things that I have ever written in my entire life. I thought that since it was the same subject that I could just cut and paste sentences from my original paper. If my own draft made me want to fall asleep, there’s no telling what it would have done to my audience. If I had to choose between composing an actual paper with 1,500 words or a PowToon video of about 3 minutes, I would choose the paper. I like to list facts and elements that make an academic paper. I like to go by the basic rules of a paper that we all learned in elementary school because of its familiarity. Pontoon may be fun, but it’s new. I guess that I didn’t enjoy it because I felt so behind throughout the entire assignment. I will never again speak badly of writing a paper, because I have seen what some of the alternates are. When you look at which of the modes were most effective at addressing the issue, I think that PowToon wins. Emotion is a very powerful tool that many filmmakers utilize to portray their messages. When you see a video, even of a crappy little cartoon like mine, of a deaths and injuries caused by alcohol, you start to imagine the situations in real life. Being able to see a visual representation allowed a connection from the message to the audience that isn’t really viable with an academic essay. I liked the professional, academic audience. I didn’t enjoy having to make my video fun and appealing to younger people, especially with a topic like mine. With the professional audience, the more facts and sources that you incorporate, the more effective your paper is whereas the easily bored audience needs less credibility and more “Wow Factor”.
Visual Analysis Unit Reflection
When I was still in search for an Op-Doc to write about, I started watching “Gorillas in the Crossfire”. Most of the other documentaries that I had watched had left me disinterested after the first few minutes, but after seeing this scene in “Gorillas in the Crossfire” I knew that my search for an Op-Doc was over. This particular scene astounded me at the level of seriousness that it radiated. This was the first moment in the film where the audience could see the gorillas reacting to the horrific environment around them. As somber music played in the background, a mother gorilla and her baby embraced each other which stirred an array of emotions in myself. Another key element in the magnitude of this scene was the graphic text. It hurts me enough inside to see these animals living their lives in anguish, but to couple that with text describing their rapid rate of extinction was almost unbearable. I am an extremely big animal lover which was why I clicked on this documentary in the first place, but when I saw how awful the gorillas looked sitting in that forest, I understand not only the topic of my paper, but the way in which I would write it. By watching this particular scene, I knew that I wanted to write my analysis in a way that described how I felt at that moment; I wanted to write about the intense amounts of emotion that this documentary exuded.
When I was in the early stages of writing, and I mean so early that the only thing on my paper was my name, I struggled with finding clear evidence to support my thesis about the use of pathos in the film. I knew by watching the film that the pathos was there, but I couldn’t figure out how to write about what I was watching in an in-depth way. The next day, after a long, unsuccessful night in the library, Mrs. Forgette gave me a very valuable piece of advice which was to watch the film without sound and then listen without watching. At first this seemed very strange. After she said it, I kind of dismissed the idea, thinking that in no way it could help me. As I sat hopelessly looking at my computer later that night, I thought “Why not?” and decided to try Mrs. Forgette’s idea. After watching and then listening to the video, I was completely shocked at how much information and I had written down in my notebook. I literally had five pages worth of notes full of vivid examples relating to the visual and audio elements of the film and could only muster up a tiny paragraph in the two days before. Every single example that I incorporated into my analysis came from that night of watching and listening to the film.
My thesis discussed how the mountain gorillas of Congo were overshadowed during the war and that the filmmaker created the documentary to give a voice to the gorillas. It took me a while to find a photo that accurately depicted my thesis, but I don’t think that I could have found one better than this. This picture states that the gorillas are calling on us. They need us to be their voice and do everything in our power to protect them. Throughout the film, the filmmaker utilizes all aspects of the documentary in order to make the audience sympathize with the gorillas. His goal with doing this was to make us see how they lived their lives and realize how they need us to be their voice. This pictures is straight forward in telling the viewer what needs to be done.
#WatchReadRepeat
As this week progressed, I learned another valuable set of information about the writing process. While doing the literacy guide, I had to write multiple drafts in order to get my paper where I thought that it should be. I know that I am going to have to do the same drafting process with my visual analysis, but it will be slightly different. With this unit, we aren’t writing about an article or other text form, we are writing about a video. The hardest thing about this is that you have to watch the video over and over day after day until you feel confident that you have gotten all of the needed information out of it. My hashtag sums up this week in terms of the drafting process: watch the video, read over your notes and draft, and then repeat the process. After multiple times of completing this process of the weekend, I hope that my draft will be so much better than it currently is.
Analyzing the World Around Us
I think that people in general analyze more things than they think they do. I personally tend to analyze any new situations or environments that I am placed into so that I can learn about the things around me and become more comfortable. I feel like when you analyze something it allows you to see that thing from a deconstructed perspective which in turn lets you have a better understanding of the subject. It is part of our nature to analyze things, whether it be people, places, or things. The exercises that I have done so far in this unit have helped me break apart the different “Op-Docs” and see them from a view that I had not previously done before.
Same Video, Different Opinions?
Collaborative thinking allows you to have more opinions on a certain topic. By getting in our groups of three, we were able to each express our own individual thoughts about the material, but then also be able to see how someone else’s opinion and how the three of us were thinking differently. Another set of eyes never hurts, especially in writing. In reading and writing, it is great to understand all sides of the material which can be eased by listening to others.
Literacy Guide Unit Reflection
While I was was writing my Literacy Guide to The New York Times, I learned an exponential amount of information about the writing process. One of the biggest things that I came to realize was how awful the drafting process truly was. Usually in high school, you write the first few facts that come to mind and you have yourself a decent paper – this is not the case in college. After meeting with Mrs. Forgette in conference, I realized that going through draft after draft is actually a good thing, and a vital part to the writing process. Several mandatory components of this guide caused me a great amount of stress, most particularly the writing analysis. In high school, my teachers stressed that we could read a certain story and be able to analyze what the author meant; never did I think of how they wrote. In the few weeks in this writing class I have realized that determining how an article is written and analyzing the rhetoric is what I struggle with the most. Throughout my writing process, I would have all of the “must-haves” except for these. This caused me to take a step back and thoroughly read through my guide and go back to the articles that I had included to try and get a good grasp on where an ideal location would be to insert these analyses. Although I had trouble with a few “must-haves”, some were vary favorable. After I completed the numerous homework activities about searching and selecting different article forms from The New York Times, I actually came to enjoy the differences between a news piece and an op-ed piece on the same subject. After completely disregarding my first draft and settling on four new sections, I can easily say that sifting through article after article deep within The Times was my most enjoyable part of this whole project. My Donald Trump section was the easiest to find different article forms, to no surprise. I knew that I could find the bulk of my “must-haves” with Mr. Trump because of the plethora of information that is circulating about him, but at the same time I knew that my guide would be at its best with the “must-haves” spread throughout. During class Wednesday, I came to fruition that I had written more of a “how to” guide than a writing analysis guide and that I had to start over. I wanted to have the majority of my guide written so that Mrs. Forgette could tell me how everything was coming along and possibly steer me in the right direction, so I knew that I had to act fast. That night, however, was the Presidential Debate which was something that I had been looking forward to for weeks and did not want to miss. At first I thought that attempting to watch the debate and write my guide would be disastrous, but then it hit me that I was writing about all of those people on stage so how could it hurt me. I will admit that I got distracted multiple times throughout the debate, and how could you not with all of those entertaining politicians. If I had just locked myself in my room with my earbuds in, I probably could have finished my entire draft that night with time to spare, but I don’t think that I would have changed a thing. I actually heard things during the debate that caused me to search subjects on The New York Times which I ended up including in my final draft. If I had to give myself any advice for future writing situations, I would tell myself that sometimes it is okay to write crap and go back and try again and again until you finally get it right.
I’m Scared of Myself
My biggest fear that I have experienced while writing my literary guide to The New York Times was failure. I don’t want to spend hours languishing on a paper and then get to class to see that everything that I did was wrong. During the drafting process I experience this fear a lot. I am unsure of whether or not to include a sentence or focus on a subject because I’m not positive on its validity in my paper. I know that in order to write this paper successfully, I will have to overcome this fear and will probably have to write multiple drafts before my final.
No Rules? No Problem.
Before I came to college, I had always thought that when it came to writing papers, I would be following strict guidelines. Now that I am in the second unit of my writing class, I have come to realize that writing is a lot harder when you actually have to do most of the thinking yourself. I had never thought that simply picking a topic and its structure would be so hard but I was wrong. This Literary Guide is like nothing that I have ever done before, but I feel that by doing it I will become a better writer.
Comfort with The New York Times
I have actually used The New York Times before I had to purchase a subscription last week. I downloaded the NYT app onto my phone that would send me daily notifications every morning. I have always enjoyed reading news articles and watching news shows, so I definitely feel comfortable with using The New York Times in this class.