Thlog 9: Writing With A Purpose

This week was one of much turmoil and stress, but everything worked out in the end. Not gonna lie, I had a LOT of difficulty figuring out what transformations I wanted to use for my WP3. Originally, I had wanted to do a homework assignment/lesson for elementary school children for my younger audience, and a blog post about journalism for my older audience. However, after much self-reflection (and even more consultation with Zack), I realized that my ideas lacked depth and were, well, crappy. Why would elementary school children need to know about textual silences? And why would someone write a blog post about them? Talking with Zack about my ideas forced me to think about things I never really considered, but are CRUCIAL to writing. When trying to think of new ideas for my transformation, I had to take into account why a certain audience needed to learn about my article. In other words, my writing needed a purpose. This opened my eyes a lot, and made me think about the exigence of my transformations. I ended up using my original idea of a homework assignment/lesson, but used it as my older audience genre, and gave it a good purpose. I aimed the homework assignment towards a college level journalism class, because textual silences are something they will work with and use in their career as journalists. This idea was pretty solid. I had a lot more trouble thinking of my transformation for a younger audience, and spent a lot more time really thinking about my assignment. Talking to Zack showed me that I need to put a lot more creativity into my writing, and not just pick an easy genre. After much time and effort, I decided to do a children's story. I loved this genre because it wasn't just about summarizing my article. I turned the different types of textual silences into different characters in my story, and explained them through their actions. The children weren't explicitly learning about textual silences, but rather, I conveyed the ideas of the article through the story. I was extremely happy with that transformation, and I hope Z is too!