Monday, May 20, 2013

Reflecting on the Creative Real World Rhetoric Project

Respond in the comment box.

1. Narrate your role in the creation of your group's real world rhetoric. How did you contribute? What did you do?

2. Compare your group's original vision as expressed in your proposal letter with the actual final product.
a. What turned out as you hoped--or better? Explain.
b. What (if anything) changed? Why?
c. What didn't go as well as you had hoped? What would you work on if you had more time? What might you do differently? Explain.

3. Explain how the particular choices made by your group contributed to effectively conveying your message and achieving the purpose of your rhetoric.

27 comments:

  1. B. Gray

    1. My group consisted of Corinne, Jordan, and myself. Our topic was Apathy & Engagement of Young People and we focused on the lack of civic education in schools. Initially, we were going to have subcategories, and I was to cover teen violence and bullying; I made up questions and researched different issues within the topic. But we decided to choose one, which was Corinne’s civic education. We went to different history classes and filmed the students answering questions Corinne devised. Later that day, we edited some of the film, and started to add in slides with the real answers of the questions asked earlier. I wrote up the works sited page, and annotated the bibliography.

    2. Our group’s original idea was having three different topics within Apathy & Engagement of Young People – Civic education, gay marriage, and bullying. We wanted to focus on the difference between younger and older kids and their opinions. Would they differ from each other? Would the older kids be more mature in their answers? How much would they know about the different subjects, if anything at all? Unfortunately, in the end, we realized we didn’t have enough time and we realized that it would be quite a long video if we decided to interview students, and film all three topics. Our final project is primarily teen’s lack of knowledge of the US government; instead of choosing individual people to interview, we interviewed history classes, mostly CP1 level. The video turned out great, because we had all sorts of responses, which is just what we wanted. If we had more time, I think we would’ve added all three topics, to get a better range on Apathy & Engagement of Young People, rather than choosing only one.

    3. Our group included slides with the correct answers on them, so while watching you could compare the student’s answers with the right ones. By filming the responses and being able to see the kids’ faces and hear them answer, we could prove that there is in fact a lack of knowledge of civic education in schools.

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  2. 1. My topic was the role of education in our society, with Hope and Alan. We decided to focus on the negative effects of standardized testing on our educations by writing a letter to the government proposing the end of testing. I wrote out the original draft of the letter. In our final draft, I wrote a paragraph on how standardized tests do not help us learn and in actuality take away from our education.
    2. a. I am very proud of the final draft our letter; it covers what we said it would cover in a short but detailed format. I am surprised how easy it was to write the final draft. Of course, when considering all of the research and time that went in before the actual product was written, it really is not so surprising.
    b. Nothing changed in our plan. We stuck close to it, probably because we outlined very well and knew what we were talking about.
    c. Of course, I always say I wish I had more time to review the final product. But honestly, I think we covered everything that I personally wanted to cover and felt necessary to cover.
    3. We called upon the ethos of our readers by using the credibility of being high school students discussing tests that directly and currently are affecting us. It is undeniable that we more than anyone else would know the negative effect of standardized tests. Not only did we remind readers of this, but we solidified their trust by informing them that we are AP and honors students, therefore letting readers know that we are intelligent hard workers, and not just lazy kids who don't like taking tests. Alan referenced a Ted Talk on education, which shows readers that we have done research and we are knowledgeable in this subject. Giving more evidence of the same account found by psychologists that regular and strict school plans/tests are not right for everyone also increases the validity of our point.

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  3. Anna G.

    1) Christina and I had collectively come up with the proposal of journal entries of victims of prejudice. But it was not just about writing simple diary entries, there had to be research done in order to achieve a finish project that was realistic, thorough, engaging and factional. I researched our topic, which was prejudice. We split up the issues into racism, gender bias, economic differences, sexual orientation and religion. I focused on racism and sexual orientation while Christina studied gender bias, economic differences and religion. I searched for websites that covered all of our issues, as well as websites that described how to write fiction, letters and other personal pieces of writing. I annotated several of the sites and created a SOAPStone. After outlining our journal ideas we decided we needed to broaden our project and expand it into the real world and created a blog. I created the title “Sincerely, Anonymous” and our blog was made. We took that same title and I formed a book with both of our work inside.

    2) Our vision was to raise awareness of the prejudice issues that go on in our society and share our researched topics with the public. From the beginning we knew that we wanted to write fictional stories and the idea of letters, or journal entries followed soon after. In the end, the final project was exactly what we had hoped for when starting the two-part project. The blog was published online and our stories are shared there and as a hard copy. We did not come across any difficulties while constructing the prejudice project. It did not seem as though anything had changed or strayed from our initial idea, we stuck with the proposals we had from the start. More time would have allowed us to create more narrative entries; I feel as though I could improve some of mine and maybe add in more facts. I would have also liked to put in the back of the hard copy, (the black binder), a brief summary of the over all issue being discussed. Other than possibly adding extra facts and statistics, our final product was well made.

    3) While writing fictional journal entries, we had to make sure that we sounded realistic and not like we were just students trying to make a project on certain issues. We had to research our topics and explore the deeper meaning of them so we could write in a different perspective without sounding judgmental or bias. Taking an outside view was not what we had decided on so we needed to “become” the victims of the subjects and write from within to accomplish our project successfully.

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  4. Kelly F.

    1. For the Creative World Rhetoric Project, my group (Kirsten, Kacie and I) made a group decision to create an anti-ad. As a group, we made many decisions such as what topics to touch upon, what supplies was needed, and most importantly, how we would divide the work. Due to conflicting schedules, we were not going to have an opportunity to work all together at one time on it, so we evenly separated the work. I was in charge of creating the script for the advertisement, which Kirsten would get the voiceover and Kacie would do the physical video part. So, I wrote the entire script for our advertisement.

    2. Our group pretty much did what we had planned to do in the proposal letter. Basically, the biggest changes we made were nailing down specifics. One thing that we had originally thought we would do was actually videotape the entire thing, but we decided to change that idea and put a slideshow of pictures because that was more convenient due to scheduling, and we thought that it got the point across better and made it look more realistic. Our final project, I believe, turned out even better than I had expected. Kacie’s editing/photography skills made it look much more believeable than I expected it to look like. If we had more time, maybe we would have added some more points; but overall, I am content with the way it turned out and there is nothing I would have done differently. I think the choice to switch from a running videotaping film to a picture slideshow was a good decision. It made the advertisement much more believeable than a video would have.

    3. Each choice we made contributed to our purpose of convincing the audience that schools need to be reformed and updated in order to meet today’s society’s needs. In writing the script, the aspects that I chose to include are what I thought would most engage the reader and appeal to their pathos. Each choice leads to either laughter, sympathy, or realization. The choices made by our group were all decided with the overall purpose in mind.

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  5. 1. My role in the creation of my group's real world rhetoric involved brainstorming ideas for our website, establishing the website, setting it up, and contributing by creating pages on the website. Since our project had the same argument as my argument essay, we used a lot of my research. I came up with the idea for building a website, because I thought it would be original, and effective in this day and age. Basically, I was in charge of establishing the site, and then I contributed to the construction of it.

    2. When I imagined our website, I imagined it to be a generic, simple website that got its point across. Our project was generic and simple, making it accessible to the public. People can read everything on the website and leave it within a short time, while still receiving the message. Nothing changed really, but certain elements were lost. Michael and I would have liked to make the website appear less sparse, but this was difficult due to the limitations of the website. This was also difficult due to the fact that we only had two people working a three person job. Michael and I were crunched for time, and lacked a third of our resources, so we put together a website with what we could. If we had more time, we would have put more links to useful sites, or added more interactive features.

    3. The purpose of my group's rhetoric was to inform the public about genetic engineering, how it works, what some effects are, and state why it should be controlled. We chose the layout of our website carefully. We wanted it to appear friendly, yet official, and not be too distracting. We wanted our website to act more as a guideline to other sites and information that could better explain genetic engineering than ourselves. We decided green would be the best color theme because of the "natural" feel of it. We also acknowledged the fact that people are naturally lazy, so we added multiple links and shortcuts to resources that would make things easier for a visitor. This eliminates people leaving the website because of laziness, or forgetting about the subject. A simple gateway website that isn't distracting is the type of website that our group intended to create, and the choices we made constructing it revolved around this purpose.

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  6. 1. I was the photographer and logo designer for the project. I came up with the slogan, as well as contributed ideas to the details and specifics of the poster.

    2. a. The message conveyed and the ideas is what I'm most happy about, I think that our group effort came together nicely.
    b. The only thing that changed was going from four pictures to two, mostly because the other two ideas was difficult to convey with the tools we had.
    c. I would have changed the overall design of it to try and make the poster better, but in the time given there was not much that could have been done. I also would have tried harder to get the other two pictures taken.

    3. The main choice was the fact that it was an anti-ad designed to make the user think about their decisions. "What's the benefit?" makes them question their motives while shoving the bad points in their face. We also decided to blur the models' faces to try and convey the message that 1. this could be anyone and 2. you lose yourself when you smoke.

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  7. 1. I contributed to the prejudice project by researching and annotating sources on racial prejudice, gender bias, and economic discrimination. I also wrote three short stories based on these issues. I also created the blog, Sincerely Anonymous, which proved to be a lot more tedious than originally anticipated. I learned a lot more about editing html codes than I thought I would have in completing the project.

    2. Our project turned out to match up to our original vision very nicely. I'm very happy with the way our stories came out, since we began with very vague ideas. Nothing really changed because the concept we came up with fit with our intent to create something personal and emotionally powerful. If we had more time, I would have liked to write more stories since there are several different characters that I had imagined while working on the project. I also wish we had come up with a creative way of advertising for the blog, but that couldn't have been done without more time.

    3. Anna and I chose to write short stories because we both felt confident enough in our abilities as fiction writers. Also, we wrote the stories from a first-person perspective in order to make their struggles more personal. Putting these stories on a blog allows the possibility of having others share their own experiences which could potentially help to decrease prejudice by making people empathize with others.

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  8. 1) In the proposal stage of the project I did the SOAPSTone and edited and had input in the writing of the proposal letter. I contributed to my group’s final project by organizing/delegating who did what in writing our letter, I also wrote the introduction, conclusion, and cover page to our letter.
    2) A) Majority of our proposal turned out as planned, as a group we were able to address each test mentioned in the proposal letter, and multiple sources from the annotated bibliography. I believe that our opinions in the subject of standardized testing came through more than expected and as a result the letter had a better argument basis.
    B) There were no real changes in our plan; this is probably linked to the very detailed quality of our proposal letter.
    C) Given the chance to change something about our project I probably would have liked more time to edit the letter and possibly include a poster or graphic of some sort to aid our argument
    3) Our group had a lot of supporting evidence that backed up all of our arguments, this evidence helped in having our reader trust our opinions an understand that we have done our homework and have not just written a letter blindly. My group also a had a strong opinion about the subject of standardized testing which made it much easier for all three of us to convince the Massachusetts Government to dismiss standardized testing

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  9. 1. All of us thought up question s together that we should ask the students and then we went around the classrooms together to film. Then all three of us had one night where we all helped out editing. After that, I finished up the editing. I also researched the answers to the question that we asked so that I could add in the slides after each question in the PSA.

    2. Originally we were hoping to cover three topics (civics, marriage equality, and bullying). However, a few days before the filming we realized that not only did we not have the time to make a movie that big, but that the movie would also be ridiculously long if we covered all three topics. After discussing it as a group it was decided that we would cover only the civics aspect of the apathy and engagement if young people. One thing that really pleased me was how accurately the students of GHS proved our issue. When we asked the students questions about their government, very few if any knew the answers. And since they are students at our very own school, it makes the message seem even more powerful. One thing I was worried about, though, was our movie's ability to keep its audience captivated through the full 7 minutes. We added music in on certain parts, but it was very choppy and, if given more time, I would have made sure to smooth that out more to make the PSA as a whole feel more cohesive.

    3. When we chose to interview real students we were relying on ethos to get our message apart. We were thinking that students would trust other students more than anybody else. It is one thing to have an adult go on air or on TV and say a problem exists, but when you have a flat out demonstration of the problem from real-world kids, it is a bit harder to ignore. The blatancy of our message seems to lend it a certain amount of urgency. When we originally decided to interview students we had never imagined how little work we would have to do to get our message across. We were given a shock several times throughout the filming both by the kids' answers and the knowledge that we would not have been able to do much better. We did not want our message to be all negative, though. We also wanted to inspire kids to learn more about our government. At the end we placed a slide of a quote from John Adams reading, “Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have right...and a desire to know.” Through these different rhetorical strategies we desired to earn the trust of our viewer, shock them with an example, and then inspire them to make a change.

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  10. Kirsten S

    My role within the creative group project was to, along with my partners Kacie and Kelly, establish the argument that we wanted to convey in our anti-ad. Once that was settled, I helped to review the script that was written and helped edit it, as well as come up with the name of the school. The school name is St. Thomas. St. Thomas is a patron saint of academics as well as the universal teacher. Then I took the script to Mr. Francis who recorded the VoiceOver for us.

    What we proposed in our letter turned out to be very similar to our final version. We still conveyed what we wanted to but we didn’t end up acting it. Instead we inserted pictures of the various scenes. It turned out better than I hoped!

    The particular choice to make our project an anti-ad making fun of education today made it funny, relatable, and pointed out the actual flaws in the education system of today. By exaggerating the old techniques used, it makes people think about education and how it could be improved.

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  11. HannahEllis
    1. My group was made up of Diana, Ivy, and myself. Our overall topic was violence, but our final project was narrowed down to domestic violence against men. Throughout the project I helped my group mates by creating the annotated works consulted for the medium sources. I also helped to edit our final draft of the proposal to make sure everything that we did was conveyed. We all helped to pick what would be written on the signs and what the introduction and conclusion would be in our PSA.
    2. a. Our project turned out better then I expected because I was afraid that we wouldn’t be able to convey our ideas correctly. I was also afraid that the message we were trying to convey with the signs wouldn’t be seen, the men couldn’t speak out so they held signs instead of speaking. In the end it seemed to work out the way we wanted it.
    b. Our groups original idea was to show all the different types of violence that people don’t realize actually occur; one idea being violence in video games. But we decided that if we tried to show too many different types of violence then we would spread ourselves too thin. Also we wanted to make sure we got our ideas completely across instead of just having snippets of different ideas.
    c. If we had more time maybe we could have made our PSA longer and give more examples of domestic violence against men. There isn’t very much, other than that, that I wasn’t happy with about our project.
    3. The particular choices we made helped convey our point in many ways. We used the signs to convey that it is difficult for men who are being domestically abused to speak out and get help without feeling like they are being judged. We also had one sign that said “I can’t tell my friends I was hit by a girl” and we had that actor hold the sign in front of his face because he is still embarrassed and doesn’t want anyone to know the truth. We thought having one instrument playing music in the background would make the whole video seem somber and get the point across that it is a serious problem.

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  12. 1. My group consisted of Corinne, Bethany, and myself. To help my group, I accompanied the other two in creating questions to ask the history classes, along with filming while Corinne spoke. For another class, I asked the questions while Corinne spoke. I also helped edit our final piece and I contributed to creating our proposal.
    2. a. We thought that the lack of knowledge in the history classes was exactly as we expected it would be.
    b. Our original idea was to have all three of us contribute ideas and do different parts of the video according to that. Instead, we just focused on Corinne’s topic: civics in school.
    c. The lack of contribution from certain history classes was not what we wanted. We wanted a lot of different people to contribute their ideas and knowledge. If we had been given more time, we would have added more classes and questions.
    3. We used the topic of civics to engage the audience into furthering their knowledge. We wanted people to become interested in the topic, so they could continue to change the lack of civics in school systems.

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  13. 1. The role I played in creating my groups real world rhetoric was crafting a website to get our public service announcement script out there and into the real world. I created a website about our topic and posted the script onto it. Another way I contributed to the project was by voicing my idea about the topic and what we should write about.
    2. Our final projected differed greatly from our original idea about what we were going to do. The project turned out as good as I hoped and I feel as though it really conveys our message. We started out by planning a satire but ended up writing a public service announcement script. I am not completely sure why we changed our project idea so much but I think it worked better for us. For the most part the project went as well as I had hoped, the only thing I would do if I had more time would be better format the website. It was hard to create the website because it changed the format of everything I put on in and it took a while to correct the way things looked once published.
    3. The particular choices made by my group contributed to effectively conveying our message and achieving the purpose of our rhetoric because it showed through a script how exactly children are effected by technology in today’s society. It demonstrated in a way that is easy for parents to relate and it makes them want to change the way society interacts with their children and even themselves.

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  14. 1. I was the group organizer in that I made sure that everyone was responsible for something. I checked in with my group to make sure we were making progress. I wrote the proposal and contributed to the concept of the project together with my other group members.

    2. When we first talked about the project we were looking to make an anti-ad that would be more sarcastic. However it ended up being too serious I think but I think that is because we were running out of time and we just had to have something to hand in. I Think the reason it didn’t go as planned is because of conflicting schedules among the rest of the group and we ended up having one person’s opinion on the project instead of all three of us. The fact that we had AP testing at different times and days was not easy to get together and get things done. If I had a chance to do it over I would get an early start and get together as soon as possible instead of putting it off until the last minute because things come up and it gets impossible to actually sit at reasonable times and work on the project.

    3. The final product I think was useful in showing the negative effect drugs in general have one your life and getting the audience (teens) to question their choices. The purpose of our project was to send a message that would discourage some if not many teens who think about abusing drugs.

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  15. Zach S.

    1.) As part of the group, my major work was with the creativity and planning. I helped design the poster and put it together on Photoshop. In addition, I helped edit the intention letter and contributed to the SOAPSTone that we did on the project.

    2.) The original consideration for the project actually had four different pictures, the two we had done as well as someone in a hospital bed and a speeding car. Based on availability of necessary things (i.e. a car and a hospital bed) we decided to cut out those pictures and use the space for the logo and the slogan. I think the over all final product came out as we had hoped as it still seemed to carry the weight we wanted to purvey. I really wish we had the ability to put in those other pictures as they would really add to the posters' impact.

    3.) I feel our message was conveyed best by the choices we made. The poster had a strong and grabbing appeal that eventually draws in the audience we wish to gain. I hope the things our group did with this poster will get our message across successfully.

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  16. 1.)I wrote the bibliography in the proposal. In the final product I wrote one of the body paragraphs in the letter.
    2.)a)It turned out better than I had hoped because I didn't know how we would all write one letter.
    b)Nothing from the proposal really changed. It went as planned.
    c)The timing did not go as well as I would have liked it. This is because with all the other things that were going on that this project didn't have as much attention as what I wanted to give it.
    3) Our group used logos and evidence from Ted talks and other reliable evidence to make the people listen to them and make what we are saying make sense.

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  17. 1. The role I played in my project was suggesting that my group create a website. I suggested we used the "webs" website maker, though that didn't work due to it not being able to host multiple editors. I helped create themes for webpages, and then all the webpages were split between me & Cara. I constructed the video page and effects page, using a mixture of sources that came from each of us.

    2. I imagined our website to have been filled much more, as well as more aesthetically pleasing. We went through a series of website makers until we found one that would let us both edit the website at the same time. We chose Weebly, which was a great choice, even with a limited number of website themes. One of our partners wasn't able to contribute to the construction of the website at all due to time & lack of contact.

    3. Most of the choices made were common sense. The website is universal and easy to access, it also contains multiple media such as videos and pictures to help convey our point. All information, such as the positive & negative effects, was straight-forward. We used information to imply a certain solution or conclusion to the genetic engineering issue: regulation; though it wasn't bluntly stated. If the browser chooses to research further, they have links they can access on the website as well. We made our project as easy as possible to access and navigate, which, in turn, makes it possible to spread our issue.

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  18. 1. My group consisted of Ivy, Hannah, and myself. Our group focused on violence for the overall project and our creative rhetoric was a PSA which focused on domestic violence against men. I filmed the footage and edited it together to create the completed PSA. I was also the one who uploaded the video to YouTube.

    2. a. Just as I hoped, the basic message of the PSA was clear: men can be victims of domestic abuse. I didn't know if I could find copyright free music, which we needed because YouTube has been known to remove videos with copyrighted background music. Luckily the video editing software I used came with free music to use, one of the tracks being a somber piano piece.
    b. Originally we planned on creating a video that highlighted the different overlooked forms of violence. These forms would have included forms of violence such as violence in videogames as well as domestic violence against men. We decided that the original topic was too broad and narrowed our focus to domestic violence against men. Since we decided to change our focus before the original proposal letter was written, our first idea did not appear on it.
    c. I feel like the project didn't reveal the extent to which men are abused. Also, the audio for the voice was a full of static. Besides these flaws, I felt like our PSA is rather effective.

    3. We used more virile looking men to appear in the PSA to avoid the implication that "real men" are not abused. We had the actors hold signs instead of speaking to show that domestic violence against men is not something that usually talked about. We had Ivy do the voiceover as an extension of this idea, demonstrating that is usually women who talk about being victims. We choose to have a somber piano piece as the background music to highlight the seriousness of the issue.

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  19. 1. In the creation of our group’s real world rhetoric, I contributed by writing a script of a public service announcement. As a group, we thought of ideas that would effectively convey our message.

    2. Originally, we decided that I would write a satirical satire. Although, after thinking about it, I decided to write a script of a public service announcement. Considering, at the beginning we wanted to do a public service announcement, although we were not able to do it because of our schedules. We already had a vision of a public service announcement so I took that into consideration and used as a guide for the script and as a result it worked out fine. The script turned out better than the satirical narrative that I attempted to write at the beginning. If we had more time, I would have wanted to actually create the PSA in order for the message to be seen more clearly.

    3. I wrote the script in a series of scenes. In other words, it was a short timeline of a child’s interaction with technology. That is to say, each time frame became worse and worse in order for the targeted audience, who are parents would recognize that technology continues to affect the lives of children.


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  20. 1. My role in the creation of my group's real world rhetoric was the idea of being a group that travels around informing kids about certain topics. I based that brainstorm off Kevin's idea of creating a power point. I also came up with ideas shown in our power point, as well as Kevin. My contribution about eating disorders was also discussed in the project, since that was the topic of my essay.

    2. Originally, my group came up with the idea of a power point/slideshow, and in the end we did choose to complete that idea. Personally, i thought it would have turned out better, maybe with a video of some sort, but we ran out of time. We had some time to complete this project, but with all our busy schedules it was hard to get together and complete it evenly spread out over time. I feel like if we all did our own little parts on our own time and then came together to complete the project, I believe the finished product would have been a lot better. If my group had even more time I would have tried to make some personal connections to children by the use of interviews or a clip of real life situations. A lot more detail could have been helpful.

    3. The choices made in our project were to connect to children, not really adults. Our phrasing of information and actual word choice was to get on a child like level. We wanted to open up to the certain age group that would be mostly effected by the topics our slide show was aiming at.

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  21. Ivy Gillette
    1. My group included Hannah, Diana, and myself; on the topic of violence. We decided to create a PSA narrowed on to the problems of violence against men. My role in my group’s real world rhetoric project was to act as a mediator, help establish a plan with my group members as to what the project would be, help determine where we would film it, and who was going to be in it. I also acted as a sister to a victim in the film. Initially I had created signs for our actors to hold but Diana had also made great signs so I went over her font with a larger sharpie so the audience could read it through the camera. I narrated the video, as well.

    2. a) I feared we would not have enough male actors in our PSA, but in the end, we had more than I expected. The fact that it was going to be an actual video had my nerves on end but Diana’s movie editing skills impressed me.

    b) Initially we were going to use my brother to convey one of the messages in the PSA but that plan fell through; we managed to recruit other people just fine. Also, I had missed a couple of days during the assignment, and when I got back I was still under the impression the project would be on the different ways domestic violence can take place; my fellow group members changed it to violence against men because we were biting off more than we could chew with the first idea.

    c) Personally, I would have been more motivated to work with our first idea if we had more time. I am happy with the overall end product, and my group worked great together, but it was hard for me to support reasons defending the issue of violence against men.

    3. Having male actors was paramount in creating the PSA and if it were all female actors then the message would not have been as emotionally gripping. Using signs was also a rhetorical strategy that helped to boost the fact that it is an issue that many people don’t talk about often and needs to be brought under a brighter light. We had each actor sitting alone on a chair to make their story more dramatic and make them appear alone and in serious need of help. We also thought it was a could idea if a female did the voice over to make it less sexist and to show that its not just men that are aware of this particular violence.

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  22. 1. In my group’s real world rhetoric, an article submitted to the high school's newspaper, The Gillnetter, I assisted in writing it and wrote parts of it myself and I submitted it to be published. Everybody in my group wrote a part of the proposal and assisted in it’s publication.

    2a. My group (Olivia, Emily, and I) were happy to see that we were able to submit our proposal to a publishable source such as the Gillnetter. Our initial hope was to submit it to the Gloucester Daily Times, unfortunately this didn’t happen.

    b. Some of our views on the subject changed and became subtler. Our first impression of how religion might influence the Boston Marathon bombers was outright but with more research decided that while religion did have a role, his violent acts would more accurately be contributed to his physiological disadvantages.

    c. I would work more on the structure and flow of the proposal if I had more time and hopefully have submitted it to the Gloucester Daily Times, hopefully for publication. By having published in the Gloucester Daily Times, it would show the larger interest in what was being written instead of keeping in within the school. Our proposal was also written slightly choppy due to having multiple authors and I think smoothing out the transitions would help with bettering the letter.

    3. My group attempted to appeal to both the logical inferences of the reader and the emotions. By leading the reader through a logical process of the psychological issues that the bomber would have to come to such a drastic decision and resort to terrorism. We also spoke about the horrible effects that the bombings had on people and wished our best to the victims of the attack.

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  23. Sorry that this is way late. i think I was absent the day it was assigned and just saw it now when I went to get the directions for the Gloucester Project.


    1. For our project, I took the photos of my little cousins and also edited them together with music to make it into the video.

    2. Compare your group's original vision as expressed in your proposal letter with the actual final product.
    a. Overall, I'm really pleased with how the video came out. While things were changed, I think it was for the better. I think we were at first a little overly ambitious, and we had to adjust some things in order to meet the time restraints.
    b. We ended up not acting in our project, as originally planned, and instead used my little cousins. We had originally thought that the video would be made up of videos rather than pictures, but we decided that the pictures would be more manageable.
    c. We all had a little trouble meeting outside of school, due to sports and other after school activities. We definitely overcame these problems though by figuring out ways to each get our part of the project done separately.

    3. We used a video to make a satirical version of a commercial for a school. The school would be exaggeratedly old-fashioned. We used pictures of my cousins to emphasize the ways of the imaginary school. We decided that using younger children would get people empathize more with them, due to the fact that young children make people more emotional than teenagers.

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  24. Kevin R.
    1. Well I created a Google Drive file where our group could all put our thoughts and ideas on what we wanted to put in the PowerPoint. I also then helped put together the PowerPoint “People Are Here To Listen” by incorporating all the different ideas and issues we wanted to talk about when it came to sex and body image.

    2. A. Our group really followed through with our original idea of creating a presentation that would be delivered to teenagers at high schools, talking about sex and body image issues like we proposed in our letter.
    B. We weren’t exactly sure on how we would present this so we decided on a PowerPoint presentation and we also added the issues of abusive relationships, sexuality, and eating disorders.
    C. We didn’t want the presentation to be a “we talk and you listen” type of thing we wanted to make it more interactive with our audience but we didn’t do the greatest job of that in our project. We also wanted to try and relatable with our audience using different types of strategies but we just didn’t have time.
    3. Instead of just preaching at our audience with no reasoning we made it important to emphasize why it’s important to understand these issues giving them a greater understanding of the importance of the information we are handing them.

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  25. James King

    1. After brain storming we, as a group we decided that we would do an essay to illustrate the influences of technology on children. I contributed by constructing the proposal letters.


    2. In the end we decided to create a script for a PSA which we would have elaborated further given the time and better scheduling. We all have busy lives so finding time to do this proved to challenging to create an actual video. The script itself is very well written and was better than the original concept.
    a. What turned out as you hoped--or better? Explain.

    3. Because I was writing the letter addressing what we were all doing I so I did what could to convey the message that Arly and Yazmeen’s message in addition to my own. To purpose of my rhetoric was to be formal and professional to persuade the audience you to consider our project. I was not used to writing in that manner and so the rhetoric was pretty standard.

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  26. My role in our real world project was equal to the rest of the group. I contributed ideas on what we should to do get attention out there about religion. I also did two soapstones parts, and we all contributed a piece of writing. It was difficult to do so over the internet, because sometimes our ideas would differ, but we wold find out a way to tie it all together in the end. Liz was especially good at this part of the assignment.

    Our group proposed to send a letter to the editor of the Gilnetter. We wanted to show how religion affected America in some way. When we went to do the letter of the editor we realized a major current event, which is the Boston marathon bombings. We researched a lot of very recent articles, and also tied it back to our prior research. We did well with this, but our target audience was off a bit. Had we had more time, I would have liked to take more time citing and finding stronger contributing sources, which came later after the assignment was due, because of the fact it was such a current event.

    Like said above our group chose to relate our research to a current event. This was effective for us because it was a way of applying our concepts and tying it all together. This even helped me make more sense of the role of religion in society or societies. Overall I feel like our opinions and ideas were well justified, but we should have chosen a different audience.

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  27. Olivia P.

    1. My role in contributing to the group project was to create ideas along with my group members that talked about the effects of religion, and how the Boston bombings incident could ave been related to religious reasons. We each voiced our ideas and came up with paragraphs that formed our letter.

    2.

    a. I was happy with how the letter turned out, and that our group was able to publish it into the Gillnetter. It made the project seem less of an essay type assignment, and more of an assignment that served more than one purpose.

    b. Our views altered as the assignment progressed. In the beginning we were sure that the bombers of the Boston marathon committed those crimes strictly due to religion, but with research, we were able to find more of a background about the bombers, and their methods.

    c. If our group had more time to work on the project, I think it would have been a little well written if we were all together. I wrote my pieces the day of my national’s competition, Emily was at a dance competition, and Liz was away in Maine. It was difficult to only communicate through text or Google chat, because you don’t get the full description of what other ideas your group members had, and that was a task my group faced. However, I do believe we did a significant job with all the other activities we had going on in our lives.

    3. Our group took our letter to a whole other level. Although the Boston bombings were an unfortunate time for the people of Massachusetts, it did however work in our favor that we could relate our letter to the criminals behind the madness. This created the perfect example of the effects religion has in the real world and how sometimes its for the better, while other times, like in this case, it is for the worse.

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