Hi blog!
In one of my last few projects of this year, I was told to persuade someone of something. More specifically, I was asked the driving question, “How can I use my voice to effect change?” If you would like to find out what me persuading someone of something looks like, check out this document right here!👇
That’s what I ended up creating, I tried to convince my audience to delete the app TikTok. At the very beginning of all this, we were given a question; who are you as a writer? From trying to answer this question, I thought a lot about what I use writing for. Most of the time when I’m writing it’s for school and I never really considered myself a writer outside of that. Starting this project, I wasn’t sure who I was as a writer, but I started to learn more throughout this project.
Personally, when I work on a writing project I have a very strong picture of how I want the final product to be. In the end I feel like my work here didn’t exactly fit into that picture. I was trying to achieve something that was very persuasive of course, which accomplished that through creative ways of writing that I hadn’t used before. I wanted the reader to stop and really think about what I was saying. The thing is, what’s more important than the final product is what I learned from creating it. I know for sure that what I learned in this project, will help me be a better writer for future projects.
For each step in creating this persuasive piece, I recorded it in my “writing record”. I’m glad our teacher got us to plan out our writing this way because I get to look back on the process. Here’s what that looked like👇
I chose the topic of deleting TikTok originally because I wanted my younger sister to delete it. It was a topic I cared about because I used to use the app too, but I decided to delete it when I realized it’s negative impacts. When eventually my sister had access to social media, I noticed she was using TikTok. I worry about the consequences social media is having on younger generations, so of course I was worried about her having TikTok.
What I Would Change
It’s easy to think of the things I would do differently on this project if I did it again. I would approach the writing completely differently knowing what I know about myself as a writer now.
One of these things is the way I considered my audience. I chose more of a general audience, approaching my writing as if it were written to all TikTok users. If I focused in on just persuading my sister, I could have taken advantage of knowing my audience really well. When I first started writing, I was doing what I typically do. I was focused on what I thought my teacher would like; nice vocabulary, creative structure, good grammar ect. The problem was that this type of writing wouldn’t appeal to my sister. It was way too long and some of the vocabulary I used wouldn’t have made sense to her. After realizing this I revised to make it more appropriate for her. This made it very clear why revision is so important.
Presenting the Work
Once I finished writing, it was time to try to change my sister’s mind. I emailed the writing to her and she followed along as I read it to her. Immediately I noticed she wasn’t very engaged. It was hard for her to be invested in reading a long document, I don’t think I would be interested in reading that much at her age either. I should have expected this since I said in my writing that TikTok user’s can have a shorter attention span. I think the fact that I read it to her kept her at least a bit engaged though. I regretted not experimenting with ways my writing could interest her, like making it into more of a story or use humour. Some parts I could tell persuaded her, just being more informed about TikTok made her want to be more careful with it. However, in the end she was not completely persuaded and didn’t delete TikTok. I sort of felt like I had failed, mainly because she wasn’t very engaged.
What I learned
Even though my sister wasn’t persuaded, I still gained valuable information about writing and the way I write. I noticed I tend to follow the same routine when I write. I usually put down all my ideas on the page and slowly revise and rearrange those ideas until I’m happy with what I have. Knowing this about myself as a writer allows me to try new ways of approaching writing or add new strategies to the routine I follow. In the future I definitely want to consider ways to be more engaging in my writing. Now circling back to the question who am I as a writer, at the beginning I noticed how I’ve always considered writing as work rather than something fun. I think trying to be less serious and experimenting and having fun with my writing more is one of the ways it can become more engaging.
The driving question for this project was, “How can I use my voice to effect change?”. We used writing to persuade our audiences because writing can be powerful, writing can create change. In class we read about “the writer’s responsibility”, it was an essay by Margaret Atwood. Writers have responsibilities because they are influential. Writers communicate ideas and change or add to people’s existing ideas. Those ideas then create change, so by using your voice to write about what you care about, you can change the world.