Arguably one of the most important parts of writing is the voice you put into it. It needs to reflect how you speak and think, it has to have a form of personality. In this project we found our voices through our writing.

6+1 Traits of Writing 

We leaned about how to incorpore the 6+1 traits of wiritng, I’m going to keep incorporating these into my writing, down below I have determined what each of the traits means for my writing and how I’m going to work on each one. 

💭Idea– This means more creative and engaging ideas that encapture an audience’s attention while also havign a central idea that is clearly conveyed throughout the entire piece of writing. For me this means adding my own personal twists to assigned work topics, while staying in the guidelines course and trying to be more creative to push my learning above and beyond. 

🎤Voice– This means adding a sense of individuality to one’s writing, giving it personality. For me this means adding my opinions in my writing with good support and adding my own emotions to my writing in ways that add to the topic and the audiences engagement. 

📂Organization– This means arranging your pieces of writing so they are easy to follow and feel finished with no abrupt stop. For me this means getting better at adding smoother conclusions to my writing, especially my blog posts and making topic to topic changes smoother instead of just using paragraph breaks. 

🤔Word Choice– This means strong word choices and memorable phrases and language. For me this means working on my vocabulary through reading in my free time and finding synonyms for words that I often repeat of use a lot in my writing. 

🌊Sentence Fluency– This means that your writing is easy to understand and incorporates a lot of sentence variety. It is also expressive and easy to read aloud. For me this means using more transitions words and phrases and reading my writing aloud afterwards to see how fluid and expressive it sounds to improve areas that may be more choppy. 

🔧Conventions–  This means having good grammar and spelling in your writing. For me this means checking over my writing to find spelling and grammar errors. I also will start  using A.I. and peer/family members to check over my writing before I hand it in to see errors I may have skipped over. 

Rose, Bud, Thorn 

🌹Rose– I enjoyed the concept of the final piece of writing and I was very proud of my final product because I was able to choose a topic that spoke to me and that I was passionate about. This made it so much easier to write as I had many ideas about this topic. 

🌱Bud– I could have made the paragraphs on my final piece flow better with each other because they all felt like separate pieces of writing. 

🌵Thorn– I feel that the ZettleKasten system was very hard for me to understand, and it has been explained differently by each teacher, I think it would be way more effective for me if it had been the same throughout the whole year. 

Final Piece +  Feedback 

My final piece was about importance of human connection to environment though nature experiences, I talked about this using whale watching as an example and how having these rare experiences changes your whole perspective on nature. 

Final piece 

Standing on a ship hours away from land, I see an enormous spout of water. A humpback whale appears mere meters away from the edge of my ship. As it dives, its tail five meters across sticks straight out of the water. I never imagined how huge these creatures would be, I had only ever seen photos of them. Suddenly, another whale jumps out of the water, pushing its 50-ft, 40-ton body into the air before slamming down on its back, creating a wave that rocks my entire boat. “Breaching is an activity whales do to communicate with other whales, as the splash can be heard for miles,” said my tour guide with a sense of awe in his voice. Despite watching whales every day,  I can tell he is still fascinated by their presence, and I’m not surprised. I can’t imagine ever getting bored of seeing these extraordinary animals. They have changed my whole perspective on how incredible the wildlife on this planet is.

Whales have always fascinated me, and some of my best travel memories are connected to them. I find it so incredible that we coexist with these animals, which can swim thousands of miles in a matter of weeks, no boats, planes, or cars needed, relying on nothing but their natural instincts. This gives me a sense of perspective on how incredible the wildlife around us is, yet many people don’t even realize how amazing these animals are until they see them firsthand. It truly is a life-changing experience to see an animal as big as a whale launch itself out of the water, it changes the way you view these animals for the rest of your life.

I have seen whales all over the world, specifically humpback whales. In Alaska, I saw humpback whales that had migrated to feed, as Alaskan waters are rich with krill, small fish, and other marine creatures. In Hawaii, I saw the same whales that had migrated to give birth and raise their young in the warmer waters. The remarkable thing about humpback whales is that you can see them all over the world, as they migrate from warmer waters to breed to colder waters where they feed. Whales are an essential part of the ocean ecosystem, they feed on iron-rich krill and fish, and when they defecate near the surface, they provide phytoplankton with all the nutrients they need to survive. These phytoplankton absorb CO₂ from the planet’s atmosphere and release oxygen. A great whale will remove 33 tons of CO₂ from the planet’s atmosphere in its lifetime.

Whale watching plays a huge role in whale conservation by raising awareness, educating people, and supporting research by gathering data. It can be a great way to forge people’s connection to nature. Most people in the world live in cities, and only 1% of the world’s population will see a whale in their lifetime. I have been lucky enough to be around these creatures my whole life. From when I was four years old, first hearing the whales singing in Hawaii, I have felt a strong connection to nature and care greatly about conservation and protection due to these experiences and exposure. Exposure to the environment is so essential to having a poplaution of people who are respectful of the world around us and understand the importance of healthy ecosystems.

Final Feedback

Overall I feel I did decently well and I created something I’m proud of for this course timeline. I could have done better on the transitions between the paragraphs to make it flow better, as each paragraph felt like it’s own story. I also needed to work on formatting with indents and sources. 

I have always struggled with my writing and found it hard to express my thoughts and ideas into words, so this project was a struggle for me but I worked through it and feel I have learned so much and I’m going to keep incorporating what I learned to improve my writing onwards. 

Thanks for reading!!