You mean Dis Topia?

Hello everybody, and welcome back to my blog. I have a new project for us to talk about, and spoiler alert, I already mentioned this one. I am talking about Welcome to Gilead. This project was all about dystopia, specifically “How does dystopia function as social criticism?” I’ll get more into that later, but first, let’s look back on something I already did for this project.

Learning intention:

We need to talk about my learning intention for this project, which you can find right here. In this post, I talked about how I wanted to improve my writer voice, which would help me with creativity and improving my speaking voice. As I have stated in my VMV, my ongoing goal is to improve my public speaking skills and voice, and I think I did this in a couple of ways in this project. Obviously I wasn’t able to directly use my voice like our previous project, as this was a project focused on writing a story; however, I did find out how I could incorporate my voice.

Primarily, I made a focus and using words that I wouldn’t typically use. For example, I often use the word ‘said’ when talking about what people are saying; however, this isn’t great as ‘said’ is very boring and basic. Instead of this, I tried to use different, more interesting words that were appropriate for the situation. I used this strategy with a plethora of different situations to help expand my vocabulary.

The Driving Question:

Like I said, the driving question for this project was “How does dystopia function as social criticism?”, and I want to explain how I understand this question now. Throughout this project, we did quite a few different things; the one I found most challenging was reading an entire dystopian book. The book I was assigned was Fahrenheit 451, a story about a world where entertainment is a priority and free thinkers are outlawed, with the primary change of the book being that all books are burned. At first, I hated reading this book. I have never been one for reading, and so the confusing descriptions of this world had me completely turned off by it, but despite my complaints, I continued reading the book. Over time, I grew to like the book and started getting attached to the characters, and this was strengthened even further when I had a discussion in class with my peers who had read the same book. We all shared our different opinions and insights, and you know what? I think I understand why people go to book clubs now. This whole section of the project helped me discover something new that will stick with me for life.

Connection to my last project:

Another thing that I learnt from the book correlates directly with both my last project and my learning intention. In the world of this book, people have lost the ability to think freely after they willingly gave up books. In my learning intention and the last project, I talked about how authoritarian trends are on the rise globally; therefore, we live in a time where individuality and the uniqueness of human lives are extremely important. Reading this book showed me how the descent of free-thinking can make it so easy for people to take power.

Conclusion:

So now this post is coming to a close, I wanted to specify one more time what I got from this project. Through this project, I was able to realize the importance of creativity in the modern era. I now understand how crucial it is for humanity to retain what makes them human, and moving forward, I will continue to use what I’ve learned to help me improve this about myself. And who knows, maybe I’ll even start reading.

So now that you know everything that went into the creation of my story, I’ll let you read it. You can find my (not so short) short story linked right here

I hope you enjoyed it, but now it’s time to end the post with an inspirational and sentimental line. This project helped reignite my spark for creativity and individuality, and even made me consider reading! So I hope this blog was able to help you find this spark, too.

Ta Ta now 👋👋👋👋