In a day and age where certain knowledge appears to be everywhere, changing someone’s mind is hard. This latest PLP project proved that to me. For this project we were tasked with creating a persuasive text to change a persons or peoples mind. To answer the question “How Can I Use My Voice to Effect Change?”.

 

In this project the class and I individually worked through identifying a topic, then a subsequent audience. After, we worked to decide the format of our text (e.g essay, blog post, or text message even). Finally, we wrote our persuasive texts. We tracked all this work through a “writing record” where we would write down our responses to in class activities and brainstorm ideas for certain parts of the project. Here is the link to mine, it may not make sense without the context of being in my class yet my thought process is still articulated in this document. 

 

Through working in my writing record I settled on the topic of the role social media plays in today’s world. Specifically the effect TikTok has had on my generation’s social dynamics. With the rise of parasocial relationships and mental health issues in young people, I found it evident that social media had some sort of correlation to these symptoms. As for my audience I decided to send my final informal essay to friends of mine that spent a lot of time on TikTok, all of this was to convince them of my final thesis: “Young people shouldn’t be spending more than 2 hours a day on social media, and we should be deleting TikTok.” I researched some quantitative evidence yet I decided to mostly focus on the qualitative effects of TikTok on young people. With these decisions being made I outlined and then wrote my final essay, you can read it here.

 

I’m pretty happy with how my final essay came out, I think it worked really well with my audience, implementing feedback from classmate Izzy really helped. From the three responses I have so far. It seems like I was able to shift the thinking of my reader yet not fully convince them to delete the app. I’m fine with this, I think I did a good job convincing them of my ideas yet a weaker job on convincing them to care. I think TikTok is something with such hard to notice effects it’s really hard to convince the person that is not being immediately and very visibly affected by the ideas I outlined in my case against the platform. 

 

That point is a reason I was a little disappointed with this project, TikTok is already very integrated into society, attempting to eliminate it through an essay (a medium that I believe to be a bit unattractive to my generation) was very hard. I think a video essay would have been a more effective approach. Of course, I didn’t let that discourage me, and I still am pleased with my final text yet I do wish I could have had a better response. Also, by the end of it, I wasn’t very passionate about it, because I know it’s people’s choice on how they treat the platform and trying to convince them to just reject that choice goes against some of my principles. I know saying that is ironic since I argued TikTok takes away from the power to choose what to think about but nevertheless I know that some of my friends I sent it to do have healthy relationships with the platform.

 

I learned a lot about how to refine my persuasive writing, and I really enjoyed a lot of the in class learning, especially the essays my teacher presented in class like Margeret Atwwods “The Writer’s Responsibility”. 

 

When this project was concluding I discovered that my dad had never completed a reading of a book ever. This was a topic I was very passionate about as I believe reading is objectively something that everyone should be doing. So I decided to write another persuasive text this time in the form of a letter to my dad. You can read it right here. I’m very happy with how it turned out. I haven’t received a response from dad yet but I think I presented arguments reflective of persuasive writing capability.

 

All the things I learned during this project worked to benefit this second piece of writing, and I’m sure they will continue to benefit my writing in the future. For that I am grateful. For that I am very happy with this project and there is very little I would change.

 

Thanks for reading.