🌲How can we use the Power of Written Text to Inspire the new PLP 8 Learners?🌲

Hello and welcome back to the forest of learning! It’s been a while. 

In this project “Mightier than the Sword”, we learned to refine our writing styles through practicing across multiple rhetorical contexts. The final goal of this project is to create a piece of writing addressed to a grade 8. Being in grade 11, apparently I have the experience to be able to provide some advice and guide them? Though, I still don’t feel all too qualified to provide them advice in many ways, I was able to recognize the value of my perspective as I progressed through the project. Other than acknowledging the limits of our rhetorical situation, we had complete creative control throughout our process of creating the final product. As someone who really enjoys writing, I found this project very challenging in many ways, and I’m excited to implement the lessons I’ve learned in this project to my fuure writing endeavours. Anywho, let’s dive right into the project!

LAUNCH 

After being familiarized with the end goal of this project as a class, we went straight into improving our writing skills.

Knowing how to be a good writer is extremely important. As we learned, the pen is mightier than the sword – becoming a master in writing will help exponentially! We learned how to improve our writing through a series of activities across multiple classes. We recorded these activities in the form of ‘journal entries’ within a writing journal:

You can find mine HERE

I found these activities to be very beneficial for me. I learned a lot! For instance, in our first entry we were introduced to the concept of “pre-writing” and, as a part of pre-writing, the “rhetorical situation”. Before this project, these concepts were completely foreign to me. 

So…

What is pre-writing? I’ve learned that pre-writing is a process of preparing in advance to creating a writing piece. This preparation results in a better understanding of the audenice and purpose, and also helps the writer make tactical decisions to help make their writing more effective. Pre-writing can look differently from student to student; whether it’s a visual brainstorm, audible discussion, or written streams of thought, you are meant to generate ideas in the way that resonates most with you as a writer. 

What is the rhetorical situation? The rhetorical situation includes 5 aspects to consider in a piece of writing: the purpose, audience, topic, writer, and context. If pre-writing is done effectively, these five aspects will be understood by the writer before beginning to write. Understanding the rhetorical situation is extremely important as it allows for an easy guide when creating your piece. 

BUILDING KNOWLEDGE

For our second activity, we worked alongside a few peers to transform a boring sentence into one with a little bit of ✨spice. Essentially, we worked to improve our ability to implement strong word choice, and to remove any unnecessary words in a sentence to make it strong, effective, and descriptive. 

My favourite example that we did was in the form of a contest, in groups of three, we worked to make this sentence:

Into the most fancy, excessive, yet still concise statement possible. This is what my group and I came up with (I worked along with my two lovely friends Sabrina and Nolan, go check out their blogs!) 

Finally, our last activity was one heck of a chonker. We were instructed to create an academic piece of writing in the form of a paragraph in response to the question: Why is PLP a good choice for students? 

It took multiple classes and a lot of not-so-great ideas for me to develop a plan and a product for this assignment. I found it challenging to find a unique angle that I wanted to talk about, find good pieces of evidence, and to write concisely. I learned a lot throughout the process of making this piece. The most valuable things that I learned is that pre-writing, for me, is most effective through verbal discussions with peers. As a fun bonus, I also quickly learned that academic research papers are extremely long and take WAY too long to read in order to find evidence. 

In all seriousness though, I really appreciate this assignment because it challenged me in a lot of ways. As you might have gathered from the fact that this blog post is already too long and we’re still at the building knowledge portion of the project; concise writing is not really my jam🫙. That being said, this activity helped me improve a lot and it made me feel more confident in approaching the creation of my final product. It helped me understand how to communicate for purpose. Overall, I am very proud of my paragraph! It was challenging and I learned a lot from creating it. 

You can find my piece below:

If you want to see my process for creating this piece, click here

DEVELOP AND CRITIQUE

Yep, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: final product time, baby. 

The final product for this project was for each student to create a piece of text for the PLP grade 8’s. Essentially, the goal is to bestow the knowledge and wisdom that I have accumulated throughout my time in PLP, and express that to them within a blog post so that they feel prepared for the coming year ahead. 

To start, we needed to get to know our audience. We did this through two activities. First, we watched a 20 minute video of a few current PLP 9’s interacting with each other, and we learned about what they wish they would have known when they started grade 8. The second activity was meeting with the grade 8’s before school and getting to know them personally. We met in the morning, where there were about six grade 8’s total, and a lot more grade 11s. This resulted in a giant group circle in which we (the grade 11s) attempted to get to know them – although, it wasn’t all that successful. I found it hard to engage with them in that big group setting. If I were to do this activity again, I would have wanted to meet with them in smaller groups so that it felt a bit less awkward and so I could get to know the grade 8s more. Regardless, though, I still learned a bit about what they were curious about and I found that helpful when shaping my final product.

These are some notes that were taken based off meeting with them:

Next up, it was time to start pre-writing. Honestly, I felt so lost when it came to deciding my angle. I had ideas that I loved, but I found it challenging to speak to advice that I could provide that is unique to me and who I am. I feel that my grade 8 self is very disconnected to who I am now, so it was difficult to find a direction that resonated with me. I was stuck in a mental rut for a little while, but eventually, I landed on something that I felt good about.

I decided to focus on the habits that are important to implement starting in grade 8. Habits that I wish I had prioritized back then. And, after deciding my topic, I decided that I would write it in the form of a letter. 

HERE was my first draft.

After writing it, I decided I wasn’t too happy with the way it turned out. It felt like it had a lack of personality, and it was a bit boring to read. Also, the message was not clear. BUT, after asking my wonderful friend Faith to read it over, she helped me change my trajectory to something completely different. She said that it was hard for her to read because she was sick and her brain was tired – it made me realize that a letter isn’t that engaging.. I know that feel so much more engaged in a conversation, watching a video, or looking at a poster than when reading a letter. So I knew that I had to adapt my form. The challenge was; I still had to make sure it was a piece of writing. And so, I landed on creating a video presentation. It was still the same letter (with a bit of tweaking) but this time, it was typed on-screen with a visual aid. I was really happy with this change, and I had a lot of fun in the process of creating it.

By changing the form, I was also able to bring some personality into my piece through visual aid as well. I included my cloud man, a character I developed in French class when I was in grade 8. He is a cloud with his signature rain boots. Over the years, he’s changed a bit: different hats and accessories, sizes, noses, etc. But, he is still the same cloud I know and love. He’s a bit goofy, silly, and pretty darn cute. He brings me comfort, and I wanted my audience to feel comfortable too. I knew that adding him into my writing would make it feel much more engaging and personal. 

In the end, I made a few more tweaks that resulted in my final product which can be found below:

Overall, I am proud of how I approached it, but I do hope to be better at implementing my personality into my work without relying on visual aids. I struggle a lot with being informal in my school writing, as I view writing in academic contexts to be professional and not conversational. I know I am getting better, but I still wish to get to a point where I feel confident writing in a multitude of contexts.

PRESENT AND REFLECT

The project was supposed to conclude with some feedback from the grade 8s, but ultimately I was not able to receive this feedback because they were unable to access my blog. I felt a bit sad knowing that the grade 8s didn’t have the chance to see my work, but at the end of the day it’s all good! I still learned a lot in the process and I still feel that my work is valuable, regardless of their ability to access it or not. 

So, how can we use the power of written text to inspire the new PLP 8 learners? Well, we can produce a piece of writing that is influenced by our personal expertise as writers and create impact through understanding our audience, purpose, context, and topic. I have learned a lot throughout the course of this project. In the future, thinking about audience will be extremely beneficial – especially when writing things in contexts outside of school such as emails, applications, blog posts, and more. This project prepared me to write in a variety of different forms; not just essays. Additionally, knowing how to pre-write will be extremely helpful when creating pieces of writing in the future, as it will help me determine my angle which is something I have struggled with in the past. Writing for a purpose is a skill that is really hard to develop, but I feel much more comfortable doing so now. Overall, this project was a great was for me to ease into PLP again after being away from Seycove for a year. It helped remind me what I appreciate about the program, and it helped me get out of my comfort zone while doing something I genuinely enjoy. As always, thank you for watching me grow in the forest of 

🌲learning🌲