Juno Beach Centre is a museum and memorial commemorating the lives and sacrifices of Canadian forces on D-day and throughout WW2. In 2020, A proposed luxury condo development would have disrupted and potentially threatened the longevity of the site. However, due to public backlash, the plans were finally canceled, and the French and Canadian Governments came together to protect the site long-term. These events have led us to today, and have inspired our next project with the driving question:
Why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre?
Before we could start writing our answers to the driving question, we first needed some in-depth knowledge of the events of WW2. We gained this knowledge from a large variety of sources, that included documentaries, lectures, independent research, and movies. All of this cumulated into Keystone 1, in which we decided what made WW2 so historically significant. Historical Significance is a concept we have practiced for years now, although this time I focused a bit more on articulating my points. We did this using the strategy of following the acronym P.E.E (it’s an awful name), which stands for Point, Evidence, Explanation. Following this format allowed for a strong and concise way of making an argument.
Overall, the P.E.E strategy (apart from its terrible name) does work quite well. It makes sure that you always get your main point across with evidence too back it up, something I tend to forget when I get lost in the chaos of words.
After learning all about the events of WW2, it was time to start improving our writing. But how do you improve writing? Well the first thing to do is to not start a sentence with “but”, however the second thing you can do is to use the techniques of rhetoric.
There are three main areas/ideas of rhetoric. They are, in as simple of a definition as possible:
Pathos: Emotion
Ethos: Credibility
Logos: Reasoning
Using these three ideas allow for more effective and persuasive writing, which is good because being able to write a piece that influences and changes someone’s ideals is really powerful. However, we all have to start somewhere, and where we started was writing prompts. With these writing prompts, we could see the difference audience, purpose, and context can make in a piece of writing.
With that, we jump further down the rabbit hole and began to do a rhetorical analysis of a text. Personally found this one of the hardest parts of the project, as I dislike analyzing text. However, I managed to do a pretty good job interpreting some of the techniques the writer used and connecting them to different aspects of rhetoric. Overall I’m pretty proud of my analysis, and I think it shows strong growth in my ability to understand text compared to previous years.
After all that, it was time to start writing the first draft. For this, we needed a strong thesis, which I found to be the hardest part of writing the multi-paragraph response. As with most projects, I find the start to be the most difficult, as that’s the point where you have to choose a direction without knowing where each path leads. The result of this uncertainty was my thesis, which went through multiple drafts before I even started the rest of the writing, and continue to change as my ideas and supporting points shifted.
Now it’s finally time for the revision process! After finishing my awful first draft, it was sent to many different people for a ton of feedback. I also gave feedback on other people’s first drafts, which turned out to be much harder than expected. Reading through, I can see some of the spelling mistakes and sentence structure errors, but giving feedback on people’s main ideas was really hard. Most of the time I could see vaguely what the problem was, but finding specific solutions to them was near impossible. I blame this on the fluidity of writing and the English language, but I’m also just quite bad at it. I ended up doing that annoying teacher thing where you would ask further questions just to get you thinking about the topic more. I hope it ended up being at least somewhat useful.
My Revisions 👆
I was a little bit scared that my final piece of writing didn’t flow well or make meaningful sense, as I added and changed so much between the second and third drafts. I did end up running it by a few people before finalizing it, but the changes were minimal, so hopefully that was a good sign. More eyes on the final piece are always useful, and there are still definitely places that can improve in my writing, probably most notably in vocabulary and description. Having an expansive vocabulary that can efficiently portray my thoughts is something I’ve always thought I struggled with. Of course, writing can be so subjective I can never really tell what I’m good at and what needs improvement. (I guess that’s what peer feedback is for).
Together, those two and a bit revisions resulted in my final response on the question “Why is it so important to preserve Juno Beach Centre.”
My final thoughts on this project are quite good. Although writing, and the English language in general, aren’t what I would consider my strong suits or enjoyable, it was good to learn some of the ways I can improve. In the end, I’m quite pleased with how the final response turned out, and I think it greatly showcases my growth over the past year.
See you next time,
Nolan🪖