Throughout
this semester in “Food, Feelings & Film,” we focused on developing our
writing skills through looking at short stories, articles, and films, interpreting
them, and writing about them using various approaches. A major way that we
developed our writing skills was by composing small pieces on our assignment
blog, and in these blog posts, we wrote various types of posts. One of the
approaches was writing personal anecdotes, such as my pieces “A Woman’s
Relationship with Food,” “The Cookie that Keeps Me Glued Together,” and “Waffles
by the Lake.” Writing this genre enabled me to write something intimate, so I
was able to work on diction to elicit the emotions that I felt.
Other writing assignments, such as “Sustainability
and Buying/Eating Locally” and “Reaction to Buzzfeed Videos,” also allowed me
to discuss my ideas and experiences, but the main theme of these posts came from other
works or videos. This allowed me to work on connecting my ideas with evidence
and other pieces. While informal, writing for the assignment blog allowed me to
strengthen my writing by allowing me to repeat my writing process until I
solidified it and became very comfortable with it. The various opportunities to
revise throughout the semester also allowed me to reflect over my writing and to
learn how to strengthen it. The posts that I revised and included below are the posts that I believe represent my progression throughout the semester and posts that I enjoyed writing because they had an impact on me personally or on my writing style and process.
Reaction to Buzzfeed Videos
The
posts I wrote for the assignment blog allowed me to achieve the course’s
learning outcomes that are outlined on the course’s syllabus. All of these
posts allowed me to “draw on an arsenal of key terms for writing” and “compose
texts in multiple genres, using and engaging multiple modes” since we had a
variety of posts, ranging from personal essays to photo essays (Learning
Objectives 1 and 2). I especially learned from these two learning objectives
how important a controlling idea is in every piece and how important it is to
have this controlling idea in mind while writing. This is one major way my writing process has changed. Even in my more personal pieces, such as "A Woman's Relationship with Food," I had a controlling idea and purpose in writing it other than simply because it was assigned. This assignment allowed me to share my personal take on society's standards for women and how unjust they are to prove how "this causes women to have a love-hate relationship with food."
In these more personal essays, I was able to “write both academically and expressively”
(Learning Objective 4). For example, in “The Cookie that Keeps Me Glued
Together,” we imitated the piece “Eating the Hyphen” that combined a personal
anecdote about a food with the dictionary definition of the food and a clear
controlling idea that explains the purpose for discussing the food, which for me was to show how “these cookies know
how to make a bad day good, how to make a good day great, how to make a great
day the best day.” That piece, “Sustainability and
Buying/Eating Locally,” and “Reaction to Buzzfeed Videos” are all pieces that
also incorporate Learning Objective 3 that says to “select, summarize, analyze,
synthesize, and evaluate the ideas of others as you undertake scholarly inquiry
in order to produce your own arguments.” Through writing the post “Reaction to
Buzzfeed Videos,” I evaluated their reactions to the fast food version of their
cultural dishes, which were generally not positive, and then I analyzed what
these reactions meant and Buzzfeed’s purpose in making this video. Through
doing this, I was able to discuss how “all three of [the] videos stress the
difference between authentic cuisine and our Americanized ideas of what it is”
and the implications of that.
By revising the pieces above, I was able to “[understand] that writing is an open process which entails later invention and re-writing” and “constructively critique [my] own work” (Learning Objectives 5 and 6). I truly discovered for the first time through revising these pieces, and revising some of them multiple times, how a piece can always be improved by changing big things such as the structure or even minuscule things, such as a verb or an adjective.
By revising the pieces above, I was able to “[understand] that writing is an open process which entails later invention and re-writing” and “constructively critique [my] own work” (Learning Objectives 5 and 6). I truly discovered for the first time through revising these pieces, and revising some of them multiple times, how a piece can always be improved by changing big things such as the structure or even minuscule things, such as a verb or an adjective.
