Mightier Than the Sword

Hello and welcome back to my blog. It’s been a few months but I’m back with another project reflection. Our first humanities project was a short writing bootcamp to get our writing skills ready for the year. The end goal of this project was to create a piece of writing to a grade 8 giving them some sort of advice to help them through the beginning of PLP.

To start this project we wrote a haiku and a short definition of leadership. I drew inspiration from my dog’s human-like tendencies and wrote this:

We had some time to improve our writing skills before tackling the main piece so we learned about pre-writing. Pre-writing is the act of brainstorming before writing to find your idea and central focus. 

We experimented in pre-writing with the prompt of “grade 11” and reflected on that process in our writing journal. You can take a look at my thoughts on the pre-writing process here:

A big part of this project was the academic writing aspect. The end goal was to write a more casual piece with personality, but before that, we wrote academic paragraphs about PLP with the goal of sounding professional and factual. The writing prompt was “why is PLP a good choice for students?” 

Here is the writing preparation I did for the final paragraph:

I decided to focus on the PBL aspect of PLP. After lots of research and revisions, this is what I ended up with. 

Then we actually met with the grade 8’s to get a sense of what we should write for them. I decided to write about how to effectively learn on an iPad, since that skill took me a while to learn. 

After many drafts and revisions, (thanks Alicia,) I wrote this short piece to the grade 8’s. 

How to effectively learn on an ipad

I can’t say I’m entirely satisfied with the piece I wrote in the end. I think I prefer academic writing to more informal writing. I found that with academic writing, it was easy to come across as factual and informative. When attempting the piece of writing for the grade 8’s, finding the right word choice to make my personality come through in my writing was really difficult. I think the text I wrote for them sounded too robotic, but I’m ready to try and figure out how to incorporate my own personality into my writing more this year. 

Overall, this was a great project to start the year off. I feel more confident in my writing skills, and I have no doubt that this will be helpful for the rest of the year. Thank you for reading this post! What advice would you give to your grade 8 self? ⬇️

Sincerely,

Me