Thursday, December 8, 2016

Final Assignment Anthology

           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.