Social Entrepreneurship Project
Project Reflection
For the Social Entrepreneurship Project we were given the opportunity to form teams in order to create a sustainable business with a system changing solution for a social problem. Within my team I was mainly responsible for running social media and marketing. However I also did a lot of editing and writing for our business proposal. My writing included the Market Analysis, which is an overview of the company’s financials. I also helped with editing working alongside my team members Eli Cagan and Shea Toner. As well as working on the business proposal I also made our companies logo and twitter account. The project allowed me to work doing some of the things I hope to include in my carrier someday. This really allowed me to connect with the project itself. Throughout the project I worked really hard and learned a lot.
After completing this project I have a totally new view on the world. When learning about Globalization my eyes were opened to some of the problems our world faces including, child labor, sweat shops, and plunging wages. I was shocked at some of these social issues our world faces, this led perfectly into Social Entrepreneurship. Although some of these issues seem unsolvable there are very motivated people out there trying to create solutions to these problems. My biggest take away is to recognize problems in the world and work to find a solution no matter how big the wall I am up against is. While my view of the world has been changed in both good and bad ways I also see the hope for things to change for the better.
Collaboration is a very important aspect in 21st century learning. To me collaboration is working with others, compromising to find the best solution through communication. In this project collaboration was very important because we were required to work together everyday to create a business, for this to be possible we had to constantly communicate to form the best possible outcome. About a week before exhibition my group reached a peak stress level and we weren’t communicating well, we all started doing our own thing without including the other members. Because of this we all became frustrated and our work for the day suffered. However we were able to talk to each other about what was going on and fix it. From this experience I learned the true importance of communication to be successful. Next time I would improve by constantly keeping an open line of communication between my team members and myself. I learned a lot about collaboration and its importance through this project and have gained skills that will be very useful in the future.
Fixed and growth mindsets are something that I have been reflecting on a lot since the beginning of this project. A fixed mindset is when you see something as unchangeable such as a skill; you believe that your skill set is simply something that cannot be changed. A growth mindset is the opposite of this; you see your skill set as something that can be improved upon at all times. Within this project I believe I used both mindsets at different times, upon first beginning this project I believe I was operating in a growth mindset, and example of this is using Photoshop in marketing. I think that I am fairly good at using this program, however for the project I kept thinking of ways I could improve. I did this by watching YouTube videos and getting critique from my peers. I believe that by thinking in the growth mindset I really improved the final product and helped my group be more successful. If I could go back and change my mindset I would towards the end, at that point I was very stressed out and kept thinking to myself that we wouldn’t be able to finish and I was feeling like giving up. Going back I would push myself to see this as simply a challenge to overcome and work through. By doing this, our final product may have been better.
My experience at exhibition was very different than any I have had before. By using a shark tank model it was very competition oriented. I felt very intimidated by the other teams and while this was exciting and fun in a lot of ways it was also very stressful. At the beginning of exhibition I was very nervous to have to pitch our idea to the investors, I didn’t want to let my team down in any way. However after the first ten minutes or so I began to enjoy the process more and have a little more fun. I really felt in the flow of things when people would ask questions that I knew the answers to, such as when they would ask about the Market Analysis section in the business proposal. The most difficult question I was asked by an investor was if they could write down their investment in their taxes. I honestly didn’t know the answer to their question and was very embarrassed. My strategies for success that evening were to go with the flow of the conversation, I was able to relax a little bit and hold a better conversation with the investors that felt less robotic and easy. Next time I would spend more time on practicing our elevator speech so that I wasn’t as nervous at exhibition. However overall I thought that exhibition went quite smoothly and enjoyed the experience.
After completing this project I have a totally new view on the world. When learning about Globalization my eyes were opened to some of the problems our world faces including, child labor, sweat shops, and plunging wages. I was shocked at some of these social issues our world faces, this led perfectly into Social Entrepreneurship. Although some of these issues seem unsolvable there are very motivated people out there trying to create solutions to these problems. My biggest take away is to recognize problems in the world and work to find a solution no matter how big the wall I am up against is. While my view of the world has been changed in both good and bad ways I also see the hope for things to change for the better.
Collaboration is a very important aspect in 21st century learning. To me collaboration is working with others, compromising to find the best solution through communication. In this project collaboration was very important because we were required to work together everyday to create a business, for this to be possible we had to constantly communicate to form the best possible outcome. About a week before exhibition my group reached a peak stress level and we weren’t communicating well, we all started doing our own thing without including the other members. Because of this we all became frustrated and our work for the day suffered. However we were able to talk to each other about what was going on and fix it. From this experience I learned the true importance of communication to be successful. Next time I would improve by constantly keeping an open line of communication between my team members and myself. I learned a lot about collaboration and its importance through this project and have gained skills that will be very useful in the future.
Fixed and growth mindsets are something that I have been reflecting on a lot since the beginning of this project. A fixed mindset is when you see something as unchangeable such as a skill; you believe that your skill set is simply something that cannot be changed. A growth mindset is the opposite of this; you see your skill set as something that can be improved upon at all times. Within this project I believe I used both mindsets at different times, upon first beginning this project I believe I was operating in a growth mindset, and example of this is using Photoshop in marketing. I think that I am fairly good at using this program, however for the project I kept thinking of ways I could improve. I did this by watching YouTube videos and getting critique from my peers. I believe that by thinking in the growth mindset I really improved the final product and helped my group be more successful. If I could go back and change my mindset I would towards the end, at that point I was very stressed out and kept thinking to myself that we wouldn’t be able to finish and I was feeling like giving up. Going back I would push myself to see this as simply a challenge to overcome and work through. By doing this, our final product may have been better.
My experience at exhibition was very different than any I have had before. By using a shark tank model it was very competition oriented. I felt very intimidated by the other teams and while this was exciting and fun in a lot of ways it was also very stressful. At the beginning of exhibition I was very nervous to have to pitch our idea to the investors, I didn’t want to let my team down in any way. However after the first ten minutes or so I began to enjoy the process more and have a little more fun. I really felt in the flow of things when people would ask questions that I knew the answers to, such as when they would ask about the Market Analysis section in the business proposal. The most difficult question I was asked by an investor was if they could write down their investment in their taxes. I honestly didn’t know the answer to their question and was very embarrassed. My strategies for success that evening were to go with the flow of the conversation, I was able to relax a little bit and hold a better conversation with the investors that felt less robotic and easy. Next time I would spend more time on practicing our elevator speech so that I wasn’t as nervous at exhibition. However overall I thought that exhibition went quite smoothly and enjoyed the experience.
Education Collage
Educational Autobiography
Vietnam Art Piece
Artist Statement
The perspective that my piece aims to convey is that truth is not found in the light of gunfire, nor in the flash of artillery. Rather, truth is found in the darkness between these brilliant, terrifying illuminations--on the faces of soldiers shrouded with veiled expressions of pain and fear that no one ever sees--inside memories that cannot be revealed.
For my art piece I decided to create a stencil of both an explosion and a quote to transfer onto a zippo lighter. Before sitting down to work on my first draft I researched several old zippo lighters left behind by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Most of these had writing or an image engraved in the side that represented different things to the owners. I then decided to try and recreate something like what these soldiers carried with them and hopefully instill a deeper sense of moral and emotion. The quote on the back of the zippo is from “The Things They Carried” representing the memories soldiers forever carry with them. This connects to the explosion on the other side as it represents the horrors of war. The lighter itself is a memory carried around by those who understand its meaning.
I started my piece by drawing the explosion with charcoal based on a real photograph. Through the process from that first draft to my final one I have 6. With every revision I made I got closer to my final, from that first drawing I slowly began to turn it into a stencil. Once my drawing was close enough I was able to scan it into the computer and make the lines of the explosion cleaner and black out the dark pieces. Then I put the design into a different computer program and cut it out on vinyl with a machine. I cut my quote out the same way. I then used ink through the stencil to transfer both the quote and the image onto the lighter. Overall the process was long but the end result came out well and I am very happy with it.
The book “The Things They Carried” was my main inspiration for my piece. This book as well as what we have learned in class about this war inspired me to, in a small way, try to express how the soldiers felt and still feel about the war. The lives lost were devistating and my piece is definitely against war. My goal was to instill a deeper meaning in those who know little of the war and if I am able to do that with even a few then I have succeeded. Thank you.
-Hailey Redding
For my art piece I decided to create a stencil of both an explosion and a quote to transfer onto a zippo lighter. Before sitting down to work on my first draft I researched several old zippo lighters left behind by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Most of these had writing or an image engraved in the side that represented different things to the owners. I then decided to try and recreate something like what these soldiers carried with them and hopefully instill a deeper sense of moral and emotion. The quote on the back of the zippo is from “The Things They Carried” representing the memories soldiers forever carry with them. This connects to the explosion on the other side as it represents the horrors of war. The lighter itself is a memory carried around by those who understand its meaning.
I started my piece by drawing the explosion with charcoal based on a real photograph. Through the process from that first draft to my final one I have 6. With every revision I made I got closer to my final, from that first drawing I slowly began to turn it into a stencil. Once my drawing was close enough I was able to scan it into the computer and make the lines of the explosion cleaner and black out the dark pieces. Then I put the design into a different computer program and cut it out on vinyl with a machine. I cut my quote out the same way. I then used ink through the stencil to transfer both the quote and the image onto the lighter. Overall the process was long but the end result came out well and I am very happy with it.
The book “The Things They Carried” was my main inspiration for my piece. This book as well as what we have learned in class about this war inspired me to, in a small way, try to express how the soldiers felt and still feel about the war. The lives lost were devistating and my piece is definitely against war. My goal was to instill a deeper meaning in those who know little of the war and if I am able to do that with even a few then I have succeeded. Thank you.
-Hailey Redding
All Quite On The Western Front
In my seminar group a lot of questions and comments were offered up for discussion by my peers, the single comment made by Anne Chase that sticks with me strongly still was how her thinking about war had changed because of the book. She said that before the book she didn’t know much about war, that she had always avoided the subject because it is such a horrible subject. Before she had made this comment I hadn’t put my thinking of war before and after the book side by side. I knew I had learned so much about how war is and the truth of how the soldiers see it. After her comment I realized that I, much like her, didn’t know very much about war. I knew the basics, a lot of people died, families were torn apart, and soldiers never came back the same. After reading the text and having this discussion with my fellow students I realized that I now know so much more, what the soldiers go through, the weapons of war, the feelings the soldiers experienced throughout the war, and more than I can fit in a single paragraph. This book opened my eyes further to the realities of our world and it is a knowledge I will carry with me the rest of my life.
What is the truth of war? This is the question we started our seminar discussion on that branched off into so many more questions and even more interesting conclusions. The first question to pop up was “What is truth?”, is it cold hard fact or a matter of personal opinion. For the subject of war truth is hard to find, in the book “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque it is stated “Coffins and corpses lie strewn about.”, is that all war is? Is that the truth of war? I don’t think so and neither did my group. It is merely a fact of war, we decided that the “truth” is opinion in this case, a matter of emotion and thought. The truth of war is different for everyone, there is no solid truth to war, is there a solid truth to anything?
A little over a year ago I went on a summer trip through my school to Washington D.C., throughout the trip we visited many different historical places, including the Holocaust Museum. Now you’re probably thinking that this has way more to do with WW2 than WW1, and in that case you’re very right, however I really connected this with the truth of war. Walking through the museum there is a room filled with shoes, thousands of shoes collected from the jewish before they were gassed. This really struck me, it wasn’t war in the sense of fighting man to man but a fight of wills, and the truth of it in the end, to me, was that it was all death. Death of way to many, and I connect this in a lot of ways to our seminar discussion. A lot of people within our group thought that the truth of war was brutality and death, if this example holds any truth then that is it. Brutality and death. Throughout the book AQotWF I thought about this experience and connected it a lot with the deaths throughout the story. This museum and the story it told will stay with me for the rest of my life and I am truly thankful for the humbleness it has brought to my life.
Chapter 9, as seen by Gerard- The sound of shells is all around me, filling my soul with unrest and noise. All I can think is to find cover, find a place to save my life. All this fighting has took my will to live away, all I have left is the dream of my wife and daughter waiting for me at home. I hurl myself into a shell hole trying to get out of the heavy fire that will surely bring me death. No more than a second after dropping into supposed safety I am attacked by what looks to be a German man. I see the glint of the knife a moment too late in the light of a falling shell, the flash of silver is gone as the man plunges the knife up to the hilt in my chest. The pain doesn’t register at first, the first sparks of agony don’t reach my brain until he has stabbed me four more times. I can barely breath as the pain swells like the ocean around me, I no longer hear the whistling sound of the shells, nor see the man scramble away from the life he has surely taken, I am suddenly in the arms of my wife as my daughter smiles up at us. This brief glimpse of happiness is torn away from me as I hear the gurgling sound of my own breath. Each intake of oxygen burns as if I have taken gas into my lungs, a panic over takes me, my eyes search until I find the German soldier trying to see if he wears his mask or not. That’s when I see him crawling ever closer to me, I cannot move a single limb to get away from his advances. In a second he is by my side, I look into his eyes and I see such pain and regret in them that I almost cry. He tries to bandage my chest, tries to fix the wrong he sees he has done. He brings me water to quench my thirst and in these moments I cannot resent him for would I have done anything different? My last thought as my final breath rattles in my chest is that no, I cannot resent him, we all wage a war both within ourselves and in the world around us, he has saved me from my own battles, now all I can do is forgive him for his own.
What is the truth of war? This is the question we started our seminar discussion on that branched off into so many more questions and even more interesting conclusions. The first question to pop up was “What is truth?”, is it cold hard fact or a matter of personal opinion. For the subject of war truth is hard to find, in the book “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque it is stated “Coffins and corpses lie strewn about.”, is that all war is? Is that the truth of war? I don’t think so and neither did my group. It is merely a fact of war, we decided that the “truth” is opinion in this case, a matter of emotion and thought. The truth of war is different for everyone, there is no solid truth to war, is there a solid truth to anything?
A little over a year ago I went on a summer trip through my school to Washington D.C., throughout the trip we visited many different historical places, including the Holocaust Museum. Now you’re probably thinking that this has way more to do with WW2 than WW1, and in that case you’re very right, however I really connected this with the truth of war. Walking through the museum there is a room filled with shoes, thousands of shoes collected from the jewish before they were gassed. This really struck me, it wasn’t war in the sense of fighting man to man but a fight of wills, and the truth of it in the end, to me, was that it was all death. Death of way to many, and I connect this in a lot of ways to our seminar discussion. A lot of people within our group thought that the truth of war was brutality and death, if this example holds any truth then that is it. Brutality and death. Throughout the book AQotWF I thought about this experience and connected it a lot with the deaths throughout the story. This museum and the story it told will stay with me for the rest of my life and I am truly thankful for the humbleness it has brought to my life.
Chapter 9, as seen by Gerard- The sound of shells is all around me, filling my soul with unrest and noise. All I can think is to find cover, find a place to save my life. All this fighting has took my will to live away, all I have left is the dream of my wife and daughter waiting for me at home. I hurl myself into a shell hole trying to get out of the heavy fire that will surely bring me death. No more than a second after dropping into supposed safety I am attacked by what looks to be a German man. I see the glint of the knife a moment too late in the light of a falling shell, the flash of silver is gone as the man plunges the knife up to the hilt in my chest. The pain doesn’t register at first, the first sparks of agony don’t reach my brain until he has stabbed me four more times. I can barely breath as the pain swells like the ocean around me, I no longer hear the whistling sound of the shells, nor see the man scramble away from the life he has surely taken, I am suddenly in the arms of my wife as my daughter smiles up at us. This brief glimpse of happiness is torn away from me as I hear the gurgling sound of my own breath. Each intake of oxygen burns as if I have taken gas into my lungs, a panic over takes me, my eyes search until I find the German soldier trying to see if he wears his mask or not. That’s when I see him crawling ever closer to me, I cannot move a single limb to get away from his advances. In a second he is by my side, I look into his eyes and I see such pain and regret in them that I almost cry. He tries to bandage my chest, tries to fix the wrong he sees he has done. He brings me water to quench my thirst and in these moments I cannot resent him for would I have done anything different? My last thought as my final breath rattles in my chest is that no, I cannot resent him, we all wage a war both within ourselves and in the world around us, he has saved me from my own battles, now all I can do is forgive him for his own.
Slaughterhouse Five
Pre-Write
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is an anti-war novel about World War Two. Reading this text I found that I connected with the text more intellectually than emotionally. As a student I was able to realize how unique the writing style is and however unusual the writing style is, it allowed the author to express the story he wanted to tell better than if he had wrote it traditionally. However, emotionally I was not intrigued by the book. To me the text itself seemed to lack emotion, I think that for that reason it did not evoke an emotional response for me. Personally the lack of emotion in the book turned me away from it, I didn’t particularly enjoy the reading. I felt very distant from the text and I couldn’t make a personal connection with it. Going back to the writing style I think that it also played a huge part in my disinterest. Kurt Vonnegut’s inclusion of aliens sounded interesting at first but to me it took away the seriousness of a war novel. Finishing this book I was left with more questions than answers, maybe this was on purpose maybe not but I think it would leave any reader confused.
To me the most important phrase in the book is “so it goes”. The author uses this saying everytime something goes wrong in the book. It seemed to me a way for the main character, Billy Pilgrim, to remove himself from death, a way to distance himself from bad situations. A lot of the emotional disconnection I felt throughout reading the book came from these three words. “So it goes” annoyed me a lot throughout the reading, for me it is not that easy to disconnect from emotion. It made the book a lot less personal and I wasn’t able to accept the cop out of grief and emotions. A lot of my life I have based on my feelings, I have experienced death and three words cannot make it ok. It was as if the author wanting to display a front of not caring. I’ve heard from many people who loved the book, they loved this quote and say it to themselves in their own lives after reading this, sadly I couldn’t connect that way but I know it’s possible, now it’s your turn to read and decide how you feel.
To me the most important phrase in the book is “so it goes”. The author uses this saying everytime something goes wrong in the book. It seemed to me a way for the main character, Billy Pilgrim, to remove himself from death, a way to distance himself from bad situations. A lot of the emotional disconnection I felt throughout reading the book came from these three words. “So it goes” annoyed me a lot throughout the reading, for me it is not that easy to disconnect from emotion. It made the book a lot less personal and I wasn’t able to accept the cop out of grief and emotions. A lot of my life I have based on my feelings, I have experienced death and three words cannot make it ok. It was as if the author wanting to display a front of not caring. I’ve heard from many people who loved the book, they loved this quote and say it to themselves in their own lives after reading this, sadly I couldn’t connect that way but I know it’s possible, now it’s your turn to read and decide how you feel.
Reflection
In my seminar group a lot of really hard hitting questions and comments were made. The most confusing and eye opening was George’s question of are any of us actually alive right now, or are we all already dead. This changed my entire perspective on both my own life and on the book. The original topic was about how Billy Pilgrim time travels and if he had free will, this led to the idea that maybe he was already dead and just reliving moments since he had lived through his own death. For me this just brings up a lot of new questions, questions no one truly has answers to. Like are our memories really us traveling in time or are they simple images of the past in our minds? Can we actually relive events? Is it truly time travel because we can’t change what happened? Do we ever live and have free will? So many unanswerable questions, the philosophy of it all is extremely confusing. My entire perspective and opinion on the book changed because of this.
Billy Pilgrim, the main character in Slaughterhouse Five, travels through time and knows the future without being able to change it. This brings about the question, does Billy Pilgrim have free will? In our seminar we discussed whether this is because he is dead and can’t change what actually happens or because he believes that moments will always happen over and over again throughout time. The most interesting answer is if he is dead, he saw his own death so how can he still live. I think that originally Billy had free will, I think any living person does. However I believe that in the book he is already dead, events that have happened cannot be changed, his life once it has already been lived cannot be changed. Based on that I believe that Billy Pilgrim did have free will but within the book he does not, that it is a paradox within the book.
A connection I made to the book is from other time travel stories I have heard or watched in movies. Billy Pilgrim’s “time travel” is different, he lives it again, he is not an outsider looking in on the time. Every movie involving time travel that I have ever seen portrays it as a person looking into the past, an outsider in that time. However in the book Billy travels back in time into himself. This makes the book totally different then other books and movies, Kurt Vonnegut created a unique twist in a genre that has been written within so many times before. Because the author was able to twist this tale into something unlike anything written before it made the book more interesting, something to be talked about. Without our socratic seminar I would never have made these connections, connections that I believe anyone who reads the book should make.
All Quiet On The Western Front is nothing like Slaughterhouse Five, both authors write in totally different ways, the one connection between the two is that they are both anti war novels. Both books portray the horrors of war, the pain, the death. However different the writing style the underlying message is clear in both texts. Any book about war written has a message underneath it all, something that can connect them all together. These connections are forged by the authors, an agreement and a way to show an undying pain created in the hell of war.
Billy Pilgrim, the main character in Slaughterhouse Five, travels through time and knows the future without being able to change it. This brings about the question, does Billy Pilgrim have free will? In our seminar we discussed whether this is because he is dead and can’t change what actually happens or because he believes that moments will always happen over and over again throughout time. The most interesting answer is if he is dead, he saw his own death so how can he still live. I think that originally Billy had free will, I think any living person does. However I believe that in the book he is already dead, events that have happened cannot be changed, his life once it has already been lived cannot be changed. Based on that I believe that Billy Pilgrim did have free will but within the book he does not, that it is a paradox within the book.
A connection I made to the book is from other time travel stories I have heard or watched in movies. Billy Pilgrim’s “time travel” is different, he lives it again, he is not an outsider looking in on the time. Every movie involving time travel that I have ever seen portrays it as a person looking into the past, an outsider in that time. However in the book Billy travels back in time into himself. This makes the book totally different then other books and movies, Kurt Vonnegut created a unique twist in a genre that has been written within so many times before. Because the author was able to twist this tale into something unlike anything written before it made the book more interesting, something to be talked about. Without our socratic seminar I would never have made these connections, connections that I believe anyone who reads the book should make.
All Quiet On The Western Front is nothing like Slaughterhouse Five, both authors write in totally different ways, the one connection between the two is that they are both anti war novels. Both books portray the horrors of war, the pain, the death. However different the writing style the underlying message is clear in both texts. Any book about war written has a message underneath it all, something that can connect them all together. These connections are forged by the authors, an agreement and a way to show an undying pain created in the hell of war.
WW1 Creative Historians
Project Video
Project Reflection
For the WW1 Creative Historians project everyone in the class wrote a short story, 5-7 pages, based on historical facts from WW1 or WW11. Leading up to the final product of the project we spent weeks learning about the two world wars, this included many mini projects. Our first mini project started with reading All Quiet on the Western Front. While reading and annotating this book we had to create journal entries in the perspective of the main character, Paul Bäumer. Also we made posters depicting a character of our choice from the book with quotes and information about them. After our socratic seminar for the book we moved into the dictators mini project, we each were assigned a dictator from the time of world war 2 to research and make an art piece about. Next we read Slaughterhouse Five as another example of an amazing war novel. During this time we also did our Creative Historians research notes to find further historical information for our short stories. All of this led up to the final project, our short stories. Overall the process of this project was long and at points seemed to never end but the final results were amazing and wouldn't be as fantastic without without everything that led up to it.
Leading up to our short stories we studied many different literary elements. Of the ones we studied I believe my story best exhibits “show don’t tell”. In class we read an article called Show, Don’t Tell by Chuck Palahniuk. In the article he talks about how the use of thought verbs bring down the level of your writing, thought verbs include - Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others. I think that my story shows this best in this quote, “The shooting does not cease as bullets rain down for minutes, one of us slumps the rest of the way onto the hard dirt road and blood stains the ground around her. A small clump of new spring grass is turned red.”. I think that this quote from my story shows some great imagery and it doesn’t use any thought verbs. This element was important in our stories to make our writing the best it can be, at first I didn’t agree with the idea that writing without words like these would make writing better. However it helped me dive deeper into imagery and made me come up with better more descriptive words. All in all the literary element of Show Don’t Tell helped improve my writing a lot.
Although SDT was my strongest literary element Historical Integration was my weakest. Before we sat down to write we did our Creative Historian Research Notes. We chose an event during WW1 or WW11 and researched it extensively including climate and other details about the specific time. I learned a lot about my time in history, The Battle of Berlin, however I had a hard time integrating the details into my story. My first draft had barely more than the name and dates of the event. To overcome this I worked hard in every revision I made to incorporate details from history. I think that this was hard for me because I don’t normally write factually. I’m not used to using facts in my writing but in the end I was able to include many different elements of history even though it was hard for me in the beginning. In the future I plan to work harder when I’m writing my first draft to write more historically because in the end it was harder to put the facts in later. Overall this has helped me to realize what I need to work harder on next time and has improved my writing a lot.
In the revision process I made a lot of changes to my story. One of the most substantial revisions I made was to add my characters name, Lenora, earlier in the story. Originally in my writing I had forgotten to tell the reader the name of the main character in the beginning of the story. Instead her name wasn’t said until the middle. When rereading my story I realized that it hindered the reader because they didn’t know who they were reading about, also it didn’t help with character development when the character was not defined early on. Another major revision I made was too take out extra commas that led to run on sentences. In my writing it has become obvious that I use way too many commas to create sentences that make sense in my head but not on paper. By proofreading specially to fix this grammatical mistake I made my writing easier to read and understand. When reading out loud the extra commas made everything sound like it was slurred together. Fixing both of these problems made my story a lot easier to read and made my writing better overall.
Leading up to our short stories we studied many different literary elements. Of the ones we studied I believe my story best exhibits “show don’t tell”. In class we read an article called Show, Don’t Tell by Chuck Palahniuk. In the article he talks about how the use of thought verbs bring down the level of your writing, thought verbs include - Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others. I think that my story shows this best in this quote, “The shooting does not cease as bullets rain down for minutes, one of us slumps the rest of the way onto the hard dirt road and blood stains the ground around her. A small clump of new spring grass is turned red.”. I think that this quote from my story shows some great imagery and it doesn’t use any thought verbs. This element was important in our stories to make our writing the best it can be, at first I didn’t agree with the idea that writing without words like these would make writing better. However it helped me dive deeper into imagery and made me come up with better more descriptive words. All in all the literary element of Show Don’t Tell helped improve my writing a lot.
Although SDT was my strongest literary element Historical Integration was my weakest. Before we sat down to write we did our Creative Historian Research Notes. We chose an event during WW1 or WW11 and researched it extensively including climate and other details about the specific time. I learned a lot about my time in history, The Battle of Berlin, however I had a hard time integrating the details into my story. My first draft had barely more than the name and dates of the event. To overcome this I worked hard in every revision I made to incorporate details from history. I think that this was hard for me because I don’t normally write factually. I’m not used to using facts in my writing but in the end I was able to include many different elements of history even though it was hard for me in the beginning. In the future I plan to work harder when I’m writing my first draft to write more historically because in the end it was harder to put the facts in later. Overall this has helped me to realize what I need to work harder on next time and has improved my writing a lot.
In the revision process I made a lot of changes to my story. One of the most substantial revisions I made was to add my characters name, Lenora, earlier in the story. Originally in my writing I had forgotten to tell the reader the name of the main character in the beginning of the story. Instead her name wasn’t said until the middle. When rereading my story I realized that it hindered the reader because they didn’t know who they were reading about, also it didn’t help with character development when the character was not defined early on. Another major revision I made was too take out extra commas that led to run on sentences. In my writing it has become obvious that I use way too many commas to create sentences that make sense in my head but not on paper. By proofreading specially to fix this grammatical mistake I made my writing easier to read and understand. When reading out loud the extra commas made everything sound like it was slurred together. Fixing both of these problems made my story a lot easier to read and made my writing better overall.