Hey, hi, and hello. Welcome back to my blog where not all those who wander are lost (J.R.R Tolkien). In this post I will be talking about our most recent project. In this project we learned how to use persuasive text to create change. Our end goal for this project was to be able to persuade a certain audience. The driving question for this project was: How can I use my voice to effect change? Now let’s get into the post.

My first thoughts on this project were that I would be successful in using persuasive text. I have previously taken sylvan tutoring to help me gain more reading and writing skills. One of the focuses was to learn how to analyze and how to write in a persuasive form. I found that learning about this a few years ago helped me achieve the goals that were set for this project. 

The main steps for this project were to choose a topic and audience, learn how to use persuasive text, and go through the steps of drafting till you get a final version. I went through the struggle of finding a topic. I was, at the beginning of this project, watching a lot of shows that were centred around the topic of feminism and women’s rights. This influenced me to choose this as a topic but when it came down to the narrowing part and choosing what to get your target audience to do as next steps stumped me. I couldn’t think of a way to narrow this topic. I wanted to be able to pick a large topic because I think that small topics like “no more homework” are meaningless and wont change the world for better. But the problem was a large topic was too much for this small of a project. I was able to find a different topic though. I chose to try and persuade students at my school to join our ultimate team next year. We sadly didn’t have enough interest last year or this year so we did not have a team. The last time our school had a full ultimate frisbee team was back when I was in grade 8. That was almost 3 years ago. I would like to leave high school with accomplishing on getting enough students involved in the sport so we have a team.

We spent many classes looking at the different ways to form persuasive text and at many examples. I won’t go too in-depth into the reading and writing activities we did but I will say that I enjoyed them and how they challenged me from an ethics and morals standpoint. 

Now onto the drafting process. This process is a repeat of create-reflect-revise. I originally wanted to create a journalistic styled piece but I realized that if my target audience was students I would need something more tailored to teens. I then got an idea to create a flyer that has a brief explanation of why to join the ultimate teams and a QR code that would link to my blog if they wanted to learn more. I was able to get a few drafts together of both my flyer and blog post. I was very proud of how my final version turned out but there was one problem. My goal was to persuade students to join the team next year but our project was done on April 28th. So I decided that I would send my flyer to one of my friends who has not yet joined the team but has shown some interest in the sport. She responded saying that she will tryout for the team next year and gave me good feedback on my flyer and post.

In conclusion I quite enjoyed this project. I learned that not just my voice can create change but my writing too. This project was able to make me see that I really do want to become a creative writer in my future just like how last project made me certain I wanted to be a costume designer. A few years ago my brother created a large document that goes in depth on what ultimate is, the benefits, and how to’s. I wish I was able to use this as a resource and link it in my post but sadly the app he used to design it no longer runs on iPads. Now circling back to the driving question: How can I use my voice to effect change? I think that being confident in facts and your own opinion can really help to persuade others. I think that being able to adapt to your target audience and change your strategy to fit that audience helps. I really hope we get to do more creative based projects like this in the future.

Stay tuned for more posts.

Peace ✌️