Hello!
If you are a grade 8, click the button below. If you aren’t, then I don’t know what you’re doing here, unless you’re my teacher, in which case you can also click the button. Actually you know what? Anybody can press the button. I won’t judge.
Welcome back to my blog! If you clicked the button above then you’ll know that our final project was to give advice to the new grade 8s. However, getting there took much more work and writing than you can initially see. The driving question for this project was:
“How can we use the power of the written text to inspire new PLP 8 learners?”
To start off we did short writing boot-camp to start thinking about how messy and complex writing can be.
This ended up being way more useful than I initially thought, as it touches on a lot of simple but overused phrases that drag down your writing. I fall for a lot of these traps, so having these simple pieces of advice is invaluable to create more expressive writing.
Now comes what I considered the hardest part of this project, the academic write. For this, we had to write one paragraph to answer why PLP is good for students. Sounds pretty simple, right…? Turns out when you take into account your research, audience, context, and purpose… any piece of writing turns into a complex mess.
Definitely, out of all the steps, the hardest part for me was finding research and choosing a topic. I ended up skimming through many different articles and research papers, but none felt like they fit the topic I was going for. At this point I was pretty stuck, one could even say I was failing the project.
I wonder where I got the inspiration to write about failure…
In the end, I’m proud of how this paragraph came together. I know it’s only a single paragraph, but it took a ton of effort to get it as polished as it is. More importantly, it exemplifies how powerful revisions can be. Pretty much every aspect of this paragraph from the topic, down to the sentences was changed by the time it was finished. Without these revisions and feedback, this paragraph would have never turned out the way it did.
Going forward I am also in need of a better way to organize my research. Since I looked through so many articles, at one point they all started to blend together. Having a system for myself to quickly go back and find the research I need would make writing these far less of a headache. My current best system is to write the sentences of interest under the source link, but this wasn’t perfect. I can always try writing short summaries for each article, but when I don’t yet know if the article is even worth perusing, it can feel like a waste of time. Definitely a system I should put more thought into moving forward.
Once we had proved our worth with the academic write, it was time to start on our advice for the grade 8s. Once again we went through the pre-write to decide our topic, but this time our research either came from our personal experiences or from a meeting we had with the grade 8s to better know our audience.
This meeting didn’t give me a lot of new information, but it did confirm some of my previous thoughts about the current grade 8s, and gave me the confidence to move forward with my idea.
If you read the final product at the start, then you already know the fruit of my labor. This was some of the feedback I got from the grade 8s who read my advice.
It’s not a lot but I am really happy with the project and response I got from the grade 8s.
Although the approach I took for this piece does limit my target audience to a smaller portion of the grade 8 class, most of the advice is still relevant for anybody who reads it. Furthermore, I believe there is a greater amount of the type of people I’m targeting in this specific grade 8 class, at least from what I can tell from the small group that came out to meet us.
What was most effective about this piece was the tone. I tend to find writing more informal much easier than academic writing, which probably played into why this piece took so much less time than the one prior. This informal tone lets me bring out a lot more of my personality, which in turn makes the text seem more relatable, trustworthy, and interesting. I think this shows most with my grade 8’s response to the last question since that proved I successfully portrayed myself through the text.
Overall I’m pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. This project taught me many techniques that let me write applicable, interesting texts more efficiently. None of it was new material, but it did include the main parts of writing I feel like I can improve on. And to Issac, if you’re reading this, I hope the advice helped you out.
See you next time,
Nolan