Hey everyone and welcome back to my blog. The past few weeks my class has been working on a project called “Change my Mind!“
We were tasked with a pretty difficult goal- to change someone’s mind using text.
We started off by brainstorming. Before creating work persuasive enough to change someone’s opinion, we needed to practice writing and reading different texts. To keep track of all our thoughts and improve our ability to write we created writing records.
These writing records contained different activities and writing excerises meant to improve our thinking.
Keeping track of my ideas was so much easier when I had every single thought in one place. I was able to easily identify faults and missing pieces in my writing and ideas.
Not only did we practice writing ourselves, we additionally looked at examples of persuasive writing. While we looked at a few different pieces the one I think I learned the most from was “The War On Second Chances.”
This piece made me realize how much storytelling I could intertwine within my own work. This piece was exciting and fascinating to read, The authour did an amazing job of illustrating the story and guiding me through the arguments in his work. Not only did this piece persuade me, I also was inspired to look into some of the persuasive techniques prevalent in “The War on Second Chances.”
I checked out a few sources, and took notes on some possible ways to connect and convince my own audience. Many I recognized from the texts we looked at in class,
After learning about persuasive writing and viewing different examples, I began my own persuasive text.
The topic I ended up choosing is extremely important to me.
Ever since I’ve learned about the lack of psychiatrist’s and mental health care available in Canada, I’ve wanted to do a project on it. I think it’s a topic that deserves more attention and action from everyone. Even though I do think everyone should know about my topic, I thought it was most important for younger teenagers to learn more. Teaching the future generation about the issues we face, can inspire them to combat them. By targeting this audience, I could spark their intrest in mental health as a passion or career path.
Once my topic was chosen and I had decided on a target audience, my research became very helpful. Looking at different strategies benefited my brainstorm, I had a lot of different directions I could take my work. Having a variety of ideas made it so much easier to write, because I had a choice of directions for my work.
While knowing different writing tools I could use was important, I had no idea what direction to take until I spoke with my audience.
I interviewed my siblings and one of their friends. Each of my interviewees were age 10-14 and had some background knowledge of mental health. While interviewing my audience I posed questions that would become useful for my own writing. I tried to discover what my audience considered “persuasive”, and what writing styles inclined them to change their minds.
From my interview I discovered many important facts that I could apply to my work. Like their preference to story formats, shorter text and illustrative writing.
I was able to then take this new information and decide on an overall outline that would convince my audience. I made my format colourful and animated, I added images and shortened my arguments. I chose ideas that I believed would best compliment my audience. After a few very rough drafts I ended up with a slightly better draft….
Here was my first draft of my Persuasive Infograph “Why Become A Psychiatrist?”…
During this draft I failed to include arguments that I considered vital, I additionally repeated the same arguments way too much. My piece didn’t glamorize psychiatry and would likely not inspire my audience to consider it as a career. This version did a good job of displaying the problem but definitely lacked a proper solution.
In my final draft, I focused on glamorizing and truly pitching my message. I tried to make my explanation concise, and revisited the information I’d collected from my interviewees, to ensure I wasn’t veering off course.
While I definitely thought my work improved, and it was well received by my audience (interviewees). I do wish I created a better final product. I think I definitely struggled with cutting down my ideas to create a shorter argument. I had difficulty creating a fascinating and story style, with only so much space. In the future I need to focus on creating Illustrative writing, that is shorter and more to the point. While writing concise texts, I should explore more examples and view more persuasive texts targeted towards my specific audience.
Overall, this project was a great experience for me. I love writing, (most of the time at least) and this was a chance for me to learn how to effectively display my ideas and communicate using words.
See you later (Not actually, this is a blog) ,
The best blogger ever- Kaia
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