Before I Began: The initial focus for this project was revolved around drawing. Finding different information about drawing, more specifically figure drawing and the things related to it. While in the early stages of the rough draft, one part that I was writing in particular was how my family are all artists. When writing, the question dawned on me, where did this come from? Is by chance, or hereditary? This lead to me thinking about what became the focus of the project: Gift vs Talent. This wasn’t a new topic for me, it was something I thought about before but only slightly.
Rhetorical Situation and Related Choices: I made this project because I was interested in the topic. On top of that, this topic is something I want to hear other people’s opinion on. It’s a discussion that I don’t think gets talked about often. Presenting this to enthusiasts of these type of topics, conceptual ideas, would have interesting responses and make a good discussion. The best way to present my project would be on a social media post, more specifically, reddit. When writing the essay, I used logos and ethos. My piece wasn’t persuasive, I wanted to just bring up the idea and kind of leave it open for response. Using pathos wouldn’t have been effective.
Genre Considerations: The genre I chose was written abstract. There’s a lot more freedom in writing a written abstract versus an academic essay. The reason I chose this genre was because my piece was conceptual; there wasn’t any right or wrong, just opinion. It was more a collection of thoughts proposed to an audience. Written abstracts are typically informal and not specifically structured a certain way. I felt like it would be most effective in being open and welcoming to the audience as well as getting the point across.
Doing the Project: When I usually write, it’s a well structured academic essay. So before I even started, I cleared my head. I didn’t want to unconsciously write it in a similar way I did for unit 2. I want it to be some-what a proposal to the audience for them to respond to. So I made that clear in the beginning by adding a title to the central question. One thing I wanted to keep the same was the order of the content. So I re-read what I had wrote and decided to just write the first things that came to mind. One thing I added was bullet points. I felt like this was an effective addition to my abstract. It got right to the point while being something different that wouldn’t be in a formal piece. I also cut up chunks of information and italicized the quotes so it would look more appealing to the readers and not just a block of words. I also changed the language of this piece. I approached it more as a conversation than a presentation, however I’m not sure if I did that as effectively as I wanted to. Another part of the piece I felt wasn’t as strong was the latter half of it. It kind of reverts back into the essay I wrote previously; bigger blocky text. I tried more cutting and italicizing to help fix it.
Now that it’s Done: Now that the abstract is finished, looking back at it, I believe it turned out pretty good. The appeals stayed the same; logos and ethos. It was as effective in this piece than it was in the essay. I didn’t want to change much because it was an essential piece of the argument. If I had all the time and money in the world, I don’t think I would change much about this project. It was fun working on it like this and I like the way it came out overall. The aspect I’m most pleased with is the idea I used. I personally think it’s a different take on something I found interesting and not talked about often, even though finding that topic was the most difficult part. Doing this as a college student was interesting. This type of project is creative and I feel is something all grades can do and learn a lot from. One thing I benefited from when doing this project was learning about and being exposed to different genres of writing and media’s in which it is explored. It was also beneficial working on something I was interested in, I felt like there were more things I took away.
