In the beginning of the writing process, when the Personal Narrative assignment was first mentioned, I thought to myself that I have nothing to write about. Which inevitably meant for me that I was going to have to make up information, just so that it will be able to submit something. When we did the free write in class, even though I wrote foolishness in a short amount of time, it sparked something in my mind and I finally had a topic. When I sat In front of my computer to conduct the Shitty First Draft, I wrote gibberish, nothing flowed, it probably only made sense to me but that’s all that mattered. I wrote the first things that came to mind, pertaining to the topic, even though at that point I didn’t have a clear topic yet. I basically started from scratch with my second draft, using bits and pieces from my Shitty first Draft to fill in the blanks. I didn’t really know what I was going to talk about until I finished my first paragraph because I remembered an event that would flow well with my theme. After meeting with Mat, I gained tips about how to make parts of my essay more narrative and less “essay” like. Going back to the drawing board, I took a red pen and crossed out a lot of parts and made notes on places I could be more descriptive. I implemented my notes and was able to get to my finalized Personal Narrative! In the second meeting where we went over the next draft, I received more tips on where I could improve. In my head I thought, I felt that the paper was good just rushed maybe. I was given the option to either to settle for the grade given or revise it for a higher grade. I decide to leave it for now and if I have time at the end of the semester to make some changes.
For Project 2, when Mat would explain it, it seemed simple enough, just write about the community, include the interview you conducted and do a text analysis. I really thought I had it, as in really knew what to write about and how my paper was going to flow but then I sat in front of my computer and nothing was reaching down on the paper. I just gave myself a break and told myself I would return to it the next day and just work on the Annotated Bibliography. I went to that and it wasn’t any better, I had a hard time finding article that I could use that correlated to the key term’s “potluck”, “Caribbean”, and “food”. I had to get culture specific and look into terms that meant the exclusion of Caribbean communities. The Annotated Bibliography took me way longer than expected to complete than I thought. Back to writing the paper. When I was supposed to be working on my community profile, I wrote words on the page unsettled on if I did it correctly. I feel that the constant theme for me within Project 2 was uncertainty. The interview I conducted went smoothly and I learned a lot of information from it. I think that was my favorite part of Project 2, it allowed you to meet new person and ask some pretty cool questions. I wrote out the interview first and I felt it helped me know where to go from there and what I was missing. The shitty draft I showed Mat; I wasn’t confident in it I just needed something to show him. When we went through it, it wasn’t horrible, but it was missing “the heart of the paper”. I was grateful that I scheduled my meeting with Mat on Monday because it gave me an extra day to work on it for me to come back the next day with a Shitty Draft Part 2. When we went through this paper it was way better, but I was still short on a word count, but I actually had good ideas on how to fill the paper up and not just try to reach the word count by talking about botulism. It was an article I found that talked about a botulism outbreak after a potluck and I thought it would be a new perspective to bring to my paper even though I am trying to persuade people to attend potlucks. Mat informed me that’s not the direction to bring my paper to, I agreed. Overall, I think I was overthinking the assignment, and making it more complicated than it was. I appreciate Mat being there and offering help along the way and assisting me when I felt lost.
For Project 3, I was excited to make a podcast on my community profile. At first, I didn’t know what I was going to talk about for that long and how what I was going to record it on. After talking to Mat briefly I had a brilliant idea to make my podcast more interactive with responses from people on” What their favorite Caribbean food was?” After CARE general body meeting, I approached people of various skin colors because I wanted to have a nice range of responses. At first when I asked the question, I realized that for some people they assumed I was talking about Jamaica but I explained that it’s not limited to just that one country. This clarification allowed me to get many different responses. I especially asked the participants to say it in an accent if they have one just to have it more cultural. After I received a good number of recordings from people I was left with the problem on how to compile it all and to input my voice and intro music. I tried garage band but quickly realized that, that is not my thing. The app had too many buttons and the simplest function i was looking for I couldn’t find. I then attempted to google a podcast maker website, but I quickly became annoyed with the results. I then went to the iMovie app, where I finally was making progress in the compilation of the different voices. I was nervous to record myself; it was an awkward process but I pushed through and compiled a pretty good podcast. I feel that certain parts could have been less choppy but overall the concept was there and what I was going for I did.
This class was interesting, I gained some writing skills and I learned how important revisions could be on a final paper.
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