I’ll Change Your Mind
Hi everyone, welcome to another one of my project reflections. Now this one was another short project, but I’m actually starting to quite like these lengths- as often times they require developing our writing skills. In our final product, our end goal was to have persuaded an audience of our choice through text.
“How can we use our voices to effect change?”
In order for our products to be successful in the end, we had done several activities and assignments. What I believed helped me the 
most when it came to the success in my persuasive text was reviewing the 6+1 traits, reading examples of persuasive texts as well as reflecting on them and keeping my writing record throughout the course of the project. The 6+1 traits and persuasive text examples were very effective in giving me inspiration, as well as figuring out what approaches I would take to persuade my own audience.
The next step we took in our project was to choose and narrow down our topics. Although I really enjoyed the freedom of choosing a topic that I was passionate about, this was probably the least enjoyable part of the project for me as it required me to change my topic a few times. As this was a short project, I wasn’t able to choose one that was too complex as it would require much more time. I finally decided that I would convince my little brother to shave his facial hair – making the topic and audience not too complicated, while still giving me a decent challenge as my brother doesn’t enjoy being proven wrong.
To take the first step in creating my persuasive text, I had to put myself in my brother’s shoes to figure out the best techniques I could use to convince him. I figured that I would approach things that are of value to him, as well as things that he knows will be in the future. I also needed to make sure my word choice would be done correctly, as to not make him think that I’m attacking him, but looking out for him. I followed up with a short interview with him, which confirmed what I had already thought and provided me with a few extra things that turned out to be quite helpful.
After writing up my first draft, we had a critique session in class. My classmates gave me some advice on what I could tweak a little that would make all the difference to persuading my audience. There was one sentence in particular, regarding hygiene, that stuck out from the rest of the text and came off a different way than I had hoped. After creating my second draft, I presented it to my brother. He had a couple things he said he didn’t like such as mentioning “crushes” and saying a couple words that I wouldn’t usually use while speaking to him. On the other hand, he told me that he was convinced and asked our mom to buy a razor the next time she goes shopping – so overall…a success!
This was actually a great project for me, as I’ll always enjoy learning ways to improve my writing. The skills I learned from this will definitely be somethings that I’ll find quite helpful in the future. Coming out of this project, I feel much more confident in my own persuasive writing skills which will definitely be something beneficial to me in the near future. Something that I would’ve done differently however, would’ve been creating more literature notes from those examples we read in class, much earlier on in the project rather than the last two texts we read.