Reflection on Project 1

What an emotional roller coaster project one was! There were victories, struggles, and many new experiences along the way, all of which I will be discussing in this post.

Pircher, Florian "Emoji Faces Tongue Stick Out Tongue Funny" 3/26/15 via pixabay. CC0 Public Domain

The main challenge I had to deal with with this project was making sure it was appropriate for the QRG audience. Being so used to writing essays, I kept almost lapsing back into over-formality. I had to review several times to make sure that I was being conversational. Also, I had a hard time keeping it as short as it needs to be. But through several revisions I was able to eliminate a lot of the wordiness and unnecessary detail that was making it too lengthy. 

I was pretty proud of how successful I was with being unbiased. I feel like finding a lot of sources from each side of the argument really made it easier to show all sides of the story, I also feel like I was able to adapt to the format of the QRG fairly well. I really liked using all the white space and pictures and headings to illustrate my point. 

I found that the ethical argument was very useful for both sides of my controversy. I was able to use the ethical opinions of the protesters as well as the ethical opinions of the researchers in my evaluation, and I think that really helped answer the "so what?" question. I also liked the way I used the design of the work (headings and pictures) to illustrate my point. Using the QRG design was super useful to making my point (which makes sense since that's what the genre calls for). I also found that the strategy of heavy revision was useful in this project. Since it was so picked over, the final piece turned out pretty effective in my opinion. I also really liked using scientific articles in my project, and found it difficult to use the social media posts since I find them less credible.  

This project was similar to my past school writing experiences in a few ways. For one, I am used to having one big project that accumulates over several weeks into a large chunk of my grade. Also, peer revision was a part of this project as it was in my past experiences. I was super happy about this since I think that it always helps to have someone else look at a piece of writing before final submission. 

The main difference between this project and high school projects for me was the amount of planning and revising. In my other school writing experiences, typically I made an outline, one rough draft, revised maybe twice, boom done. In this project we planned EXTENSIVELY before starting to write, which made the draft WAY easier to put together when we got to that stage. Also as I previously mentioned, I never realized that there were so many ways to revise a piece of writing. We evaluated it in SO many ways that it made me feel really confident about my final work. 

I think I learned some valuable skills and techniques in this project that I could utilize in the future. For example, headings. I LOVE headings. I think they make life way easier, and in this project I learned how helpful they are in organizing information. Also, I had always been a little nervous to use pictures in my writing. But seeing how effective they were in this project makes me feel like in the future they could be really useful. But the most useful skill I practiced in this project would have to be planning and revision. I will definitely be taking more time to plan and organize my sources and information in future writing, because it was so incredibly helpful. Also revising so many different ways was really helpful in that it made me feel like I had covered all of the issues I could have in my writing (although that probably isn't true).

While this project was a pain in the butt, it was actually really enlightening. Throughout the long and tedious journey, I learned more about writing (more specifically MY writing) than in any high school writing assignment. 



Reflection on the Reflection:

I found that my fellow students Chris and Allison had similar thoughts as me on Project One. Overall it seems like my classmates and I had a lot in common when it came to the problems and victories that we had in Project One. Hopefully we are able to use what we learned from this project to help us overcome problems in our future assignments. 

Chris also had a hard time motivating himself to do a project that wasn't due till Saturday when all the other more immediate homework was due. He also was similar to me in that he really liked the specificity of the rubric and the project in general. His post on Project One made me feel like my problems were actually common ones, and that maybe I'm not as terrible of a student as I thought. I also really like the title of his blog, it made me lol. 

I learned from Allison that it can be helpful to put yourself in the reader's shoes when writing assignments like this. I feel like that is a really good technique that I could use later on. She also seemed to have the problem that I did with writing too formally, but it seems like we were both able to overcome this issue.