Thlog to end all thlogs (unless we have one next week or the week after)

This week was group presentation week!!! WOO HOO!

I learned a lot of cool tid bits of information from everyone’s group projects. Even when I already pretty much knew the information it was still nice to see it laid out/presented in a new and interesting way.

            I remember feeling like I got a lot out of the semicolon presentation. Before, I didn’t realize that you could use semicolons when items in a list already have commas. I know there has been at least one time when I came across that problem in my writing and didn’t know what to do. I also liked the video that the group that had hedged language and qualified claims included. Maybe if Donald Trump took some pointers about when to use hedged language he wouldn’t sound like such a giant turd all the time. (Whoops did I just show too much of a political opinion there? Hope I didn’t scare away my moderate blog readers…) :P I also learned a lot about my own group’s subject: parallelism. When we sat down together to put together our powerpoint it was pretty easy at first to just slap down the basic stuff that we already knew. It got hard when we realized we needed to make this thing last 15 minutes so we had to dig deeper than just the surface level info. It was cool once the ideas started flowing because we were all coming up with kinda out of the box ways that parallelism could be applied in writing. I think that if anything, I’ll recognize parallelism in more places now than I did before.

            Last thing I learned: Despite not liking presenting in front of people, it can be done. I survived my first college presentation, and I’m sure a lot of other kids in the class are in the same boat. GO US!

Yet another thlog

                  So this week I realized yet again that I have issues remembering to write my weekly thlogs. This realization prompted me to finally, week eight, turn on a weekly alarm to remind myself. This may have been a more helpful lesson had I learned it earlier on in this class but that’s alright: better late than never!

                  This week was also the week we turned in our WP3’s! (Woo Hoo! Done with WP’s, that’s pretty cool!) I have no idea how I did on it but it did stretch me to my limits and made me more comfortable with being pushed out of my comfort zone.

                  One cool thing I noticed this week was how much this class has actually changed my writing/writing process for the better. I had two other essays due this week (in addition to WP3), one for anthropology and one for history. When I was writing those essays I used a lot of the small writing tricks I’ve learned in this class. For example, when I was writing my history paper I included “∆∆∆∆” when I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to say so that I could easily come back to it. And for my anthropology paper I started with a quote because I remembered Zack saying that was a good way to liven up a hook (or something along those lines). Anyways, I know it’s not technically something I learned this week but I still feel like it’s significant enough to warrant mentioning. It was really cool to see the class directly helping my writing like that because this class has been really tough and a lot of work for me. It’s nice that this class is making me better at writing though, that makes it worth it… especially since I think that’s the whole point of the class.

Anyways that’s this week’s edition of Kennedy’s Thoughts! Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you all next week.

PB3A: Great Minds Discuss Ideas

The article I chose to work with, at least for now, is “The Benefit of Pets and Animal-Assisted Therapy to the Health of Older Individuals” because I figured you could make that into something that would work for adults and children. At first I was going to use an article about cocaine use by college students, because I thought it was interesting, but then I realized that making that into a format appropriate for children would be extremely difficult.

Idea 1: My first idea, and the one I am most enthusiastic about, is making a coloring book for the younger audience. I’ve seen my nieces and nephews with coloring books that also have a story to go along with the pictures. I thought this would be a way to achieve the same thing that a children’s story book would but it is a bit more creative and different. I know Zack likes different so that is what I’m really trying to focus on with my ideas. I think my grade will benefit from being as unique as possible but it will also push me out of my comfort zone, and hey, maybe I will even have more fun along the way.

Idea 2: So I am pretty set in stone with what I want to do for the younger audience, but I am having more difficulties with pinning down an idea for the older audience. I am fiddling with the idea of doing tumblr posts, but they generally don’t say much so I would have to think really out of the box if I did. One way that I might be able to make it work is if I do a series of tumblr posts that all work together and are a part of the same tumblr page. I think that if I can figure out a way to make this work it would be really freaking cool because tumblr is super artsy (the visuals I could work with would make it really interesting).

Idea 3: My alternate idea for the older audience is a blog post. I really want to find a way to incorporate cool visuals to both parts of my WP, and the coloring book obviously has that covered, so a blog post seems like a good way to incorporate them with the older audience as well. My mind keeps going back to this one blog post I read one time about a girl’s travels to Europe. She wrote the post basically as if we were reading her thoughts as she had them and she included pictures when they were relevant to what she had written. This is the particular style of blog I would want to do for my older audience (specifically targeted at people from the ages of 20-35). I’m choosing to make my audience young adults rather than elderly people because I feel like that enables me to use technological genres rather than somewhat boring (at least in my opinion) genres like a newspaper article.

Anyways, although I don’t have the exact ideas pinned down for what I want to do yet, I am pretty firm in doing something that is as creative/unique as I can possibly manage. One difficulty I know I will face with my older audience is formatting it and making it look nice because I really suck at working with technology. For instance, a few weeks ago when Microsoft Word froze on my computer I had absolutely no idea what to do to fix it. I essentially was just like “Welp, looks like its time to buy a new laptop!” until my less technologically challenged friend helped my idiotic self. Nonetheless, I am going to try my hardest to figure the formatting out and make it look super badass because I know that it will turn out better than playing it safe and going with what I know.