Hello everyone and welcome back to the first blog post of the year. Starting off the year strong with a writing project. In this project, I learned a lot about idea generation and how important that can be when trying to write with a big prompt. In this project, we did two pieces of writing. An academic piece of writing and an advice piece for our younger peers. Throughout this project, I will be taking you through the ups and downs of this project and what I learned.

To start off, we talked about what leadership is and what it means to us. I think this was a super good way to start off the project because one of our final products would be taking a leadership role for some of the younger students. Below, you can see what I wrote for my definition:

Next, we talked about writing. We were asked the question “Why is good writing so hard”. This was a super eye opening question because it gave us a different perspective on our writing. By coming up with answers to this question, it let us have a better idea of what to change to look for in our writing. Below, you can see the questions that me and my group came up with:

Next, we started our writing journal. This would be the main way that we would generate ideas for our academic piece of writing. We started off with a free write where we just talked about Grade 11 and our thoughts on it so far, what we were nervous for, and what some of our goals were. I did this on a piece of paper and I didn’t take a picture. But it was a good way for getting my brain juices flowing. After the writing, we reflected on the process.

We also did a brainstorm in small groups. You can check out that brain storm below:

To prepare for the academic writing, we did a writing workshop. We switched out adverbs and switched around sentences to try and make them more meaningful and powerful. In the end, I think this really helped my final writing piece because it gave me some good ideas on how to improve my writing to make it sound more “purple prose-y”.

In the end, my academic writing took a long time to do. The “driving question” of the writing piece was ‘why is PLP a good choice for students’. I decided to focus on how PBL (Project based learning) is good for students. I chose to research 6 sources. In one of those sources, I researched the negative effects of PBL to make sure that I had all the different perspectives. Below, you can read my final academic piece of writing:

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Next, we started our advice writing for the Grade 8’s. This was a massive prompt that was very overwhelming in the begging, but the more that we got into it, the more interesting it was. We had an early morning meeting with the Grade 8’s and we just talked to them. I had some conversation guiding questions already which I think helped it runs lot more smoothly. After talking to them, I figured out that a lot of them were still super scared to be there. My advice piece centred around thing’s that I had learned and that I thought were valuable pieces of information that I could pass on to the Grade 8’s to make their year run smoother.

I got many many revisions. While they were annoying at the time, looking back they definitely made my final product better. Below you can check out the revisions that I got, plus my final product:

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In the end, this project was fun. I enjoyed getting write an academic piece and also getting to write a more toned down and down to earth piece for the Grade 8’s. This project has taught me many things, but among all of them, revision is a key part of success of any writing. 

Thanks for reading!

Best wishes,

Dana