In Class Essays Galore
Expository
Persuasive
Narrative
Satire
Essays, essays and more essays. That’s what this first month of school has consisted of in PLP.
We began by learning writing processes, and that although everyone starts writing in different ways the most important thing to do is just start. Getting the words on the page is the hardest part and it’s best to just start.
Next we learned about expository essays. We did this by writing one and reading four. These essays were all different from each other and showed us all different styles of expository essays. These showed us different ways authors can use style and form to impact the message they were trying to get across.
After that we wrote and read both persuasive and narrative essays. All three of these types of essays really helped us learn about different styles of writing and how we can improve our writing.
The final part of this unit was creating a satire. But wait, what is satire again? Before we could start our projects we had to spend a class learning the different between satire and parody. Then we had to think. What would make a good satire? How can I present this? Finally, after spending a while thinking about it I decided to make an infomercial pointing out all the stupid things we buy that we really don’t need.
This infomercial tried to convince people to buy a “Kitchen Prep 3000.” What is that? Watch to find out!
Usually I’d film in class but for this project that seemed really pointless. I guess I could have used my class time to film in front of a green screen and edited it to look like a kitchen, but A. why would I do that if I have a perfectly good kitchen at home? And B. no knives (I mean kitchen Prep 3000s) at school!
The one issue with this was as it was an individual project and I was filming at home, over the Thanksgiving Weekend, I couldn’t get any class mates in my video…but I got my mom! Shout out to her for being so willing to be in my video! Also, I ended up filming in my grandparents kitchen because it has better lighting and I like it better so shout out to them too for letting me clutter their drawers (only temporarily, I swear!)
We had like four classes to work on this project so if I filmed at home how did I use that time? Well I would have edited or something then, except I didn’t even have time to film until the weekend so I used that time to write my script, make a shot list and watch tons of infomercials and satires for inspiration.
This satire was actually really fun to make, it’s not very often I get to put my school projects under the category “Comedy” instead of “Educational” on YouTube.
All in all this unit has really helped me think about ways to become a better writer. It’s impossible to perfect the art of writing, but the more you write, the better you’ll become