The Book of Us is a project we worked on where each student created a story about themselves that was following one of the six writing styles that Dr. P showed to us. These types were: Express and Reflect, Inform and Explain, Evaluate and Judge, Inquire and Explore, Analyze and Interpret, and finally Take a Stand/Propose a Solution. You can see some more in depth descriptions of these writing styles here. We started by brainstorming ideas for our article using a method called 1 topic equals 18 topics. Dr. P showed us how to do it. He was really good at it and could do one on pretty much anything, he even did one on dumplings. I did not do so well, you can see my brainstorming attempt bellow. After we did this brainstorming session, we did quite a few quickwrites to test out these styles of writing. We did a knew topic each day. I personally was a little confused on exactly how to write in some of the styles. Dr. P would laugh sometimes when I thought I had written a pretty good Express and Reflect, but it turned out to be an Inform and Explain. After trying all of theser methods, I felt the most comfortable with writing with the Evaluate and Judge style. Here is my second quickwrite of this style right here.
After this point, we started to create our first drafts or as Dr. P referred to them as "Down Drafts", and the choosing of our mentor text. The down drafts were described to us as just getting all of your ideas down on your paper. You can always edit later. So that is what I did, or at least what I tried to do. Whilst doing this I was still critical and tried to change what I was writing when I really needed to just get my ideas down. I think this has been tough for me before because I really want my work to be good and when I start off and it does not look good to other people, it kind of makes me want to do something else. I am always trying to make it better and it has been difficult to get used to receiving feedback about my writing, but I am growing to like it more when I see how much better the final product is. You can check out my down draft over here. Now for our mentor text, we had to choose a mentor text in order to get an idea on where our writing should be going. The mentor text was an article or story that related directly or pretty closely to what we were writing about. My mentor text was recommended to me by Dr. P. The story was called The Last Child in the Woods. |
Once we started writing our stories, we continued to write and edit as well as receive feedback about our papers until we reached our Final Draft point. I really liked my final product and I think it displayed my ideas really well about my topic which was the Boy Scouts of America. In my story, I quoted Julius Caeser. He once said the Experience is the teacher of all things and I completely agree with that. We learn best through our experiences and I talked about that quite a bit in my story.
Looking back on this project, I know I wanted to make my story something interesting. I also wanted to make it something that I knew a lot about, so that is when I chose to talk about the Boy Scouts of America. Originally when I started writing about this topic, I wanted to do it like a Express and Reflect and talk about my many experiences, but I realized later that there was a whole other story hidden in the form of Evaluate and Judge, so I ended up going with this one. In the beginning, people recommended that i commit to one of the writing styles, becuase what I was doing at the time was a combination of two of them. I made further changes to my document to make more of an Evaluate and Judge and less of an Express and Reflect. During this project, I tried to understand each of the writing styles so in the future, I will be able to pick one depending on what I have to write. I think now, i would like to change my piece to make it more clear, I feel right now that it is a little bit unorganized an I think it could be made a ton better if my ideas sounded more like a story and less like a rant.
Looking back on this project, I know I wanted to make my story something interesting. I also wanted to make it something that I knew a lot about, so that is when I chose to talk about the Boy Scouts of America. Originally when I started writing about this topic, I wanted to do it like a Express and Reflect and talk about my many experiences, but I realized later that there was a whole other story hidden in the form of Evaluate and Judge, so I ended up going with this one. In the beginning, people recommended that i commit to one of the writing styles, becuase what I was doing at the time was a combination of two of them. I made further changes to my document to make more of an Evaluate and Judge and less of an Express and Reflect. During this project, I tried to understand each of the writing styles so in the future, I will be able to pick one depending on what I have to write. I think now, i would like to change my piece to make it more clear, I feel right now that it is a little bit unorganized an I think it could be made a ton better if my ideas sounded more like a story and less like a rant.