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.
Really cool ideas! Just wanted to let you know if you still wanted to do the topic of cocaine use by college students, I think you still can. By a younger audience, I think teenagers might also be included, and I leaned about different drugs like cocaine my junior year. The coloring book idea seems very unique. Do you think you will be able to incorporate enough textual information/writing though? If so, go for it. Also, when it comes to the older audience, I do not think a Tumblr post satisfies their age group. That is probably directed towards the younger audience who uses it much more. The blog idea though would be really cool to see! It would probably be easier too, because we work with blogs on a daily basis. I am sure your writing project will be very unique and creative! Good luck with the formatting. If you are thinking how you will format a blog, you can just create a new blog account and post an actual blog then just screenshot the final product. I think that would be easiest.
ReplyDeleteI think it's great that you are giving all of this a lot of thought, I can tell that you really care by the fact that you really want to reassure yourself that you are making the right choice for your older audience genre. First off, I want to say that I think the coloring book idea is brilliant and very original, I am very glad that you are so enthusiastic about it which I feel is a sign of how well you will do with it, it may be hard to incorporate words but that doesn't have to too hard. It could act like an interactive reader. In my opinion, I would go for the blog post instead of the tumblr posts, first off because I feel like tumblr posts may be geared toward a younger audience. Furthermore, your pitch for the blog sounds really cool, the way you want to add all these images and I feel like it correlates well with your idea. I enjoy seeing how much you care about this project, I'm sure you will do very well, so I wish you the best of luck!
ReplyDeleteA children's book definitely seems very interesting and unique! I feel like one of the most difficult parts for that would be the illustrations and pictures. How do you plan on drawing or finding the most effective pictures that will capture the children's attention? What parts of the story do you draw and not draw? It's great that you're passionate about this idea, and I know you'll come up with a great product. In terms of tumblr, I definitely see the difficulty in recreating it, as the amount of pictures on tumblr largely outweighs the amount of written language on there. A blog is definitely similar, and a good alternative if tumblr does not work out. It'd be pretty cool if you did a blog since our class is centered around our own blogs! We could probably then compare your blog for the WP3 project to our own blogs and compare those conventions haha. What kinds of posts would you write...meaning how do you plan on making each post within the blog different from each other? Or would you want them to be the same? Is your goal of the blog to inform the audience or is it more like the types of blogs where it's similar to a journal and the author is writing for himself/herself? Anyway, can't wait to see the work you produce!
ReplyDeleteKennedy,
ReplyDeleteYes, “fun” is very important to me. I’d be lying if I said “different” wasn’t something I wanted the class to be thinking about and striving for—it is, but that doesn’t mean that traditional genre transformations can’t also be superduper well done. For the children’s coloring book, I’d encourage you to include text within it. With all due respect to picture book authors, I don’t feel like that’d be “enough” for this project—I want you to gain practice in applying the appropriate audience-focused conventions to the language itself (in addition to the pictures too: think “visual rhetoric”—that’s important!).
I haven’t had any students submit a Tumbler-transformed genre yet, so… ☺ Question, though: who uses/reads Tumblr? I guess it’s people between 15-30, or something like that, right? Point is, I guess it could go older or younger.
So some questions I want you to think about are: OK, why Tumblr? What about Tumblr, or what affordances within Tumblr, can help you bring that scholarly article “to life”? How can that help you capture the essence of the piece and the “big ideas” within it? Who’s making that Tumblr page, who is directed towards, and why?
As long as you’re making purposeful, rhetorical decisions here, I think you’ll do just fine. Make sure you have fun with it, Kennedy.
Z
Hey, Kennedy! As soon as I read about your coloring book idea, I was like wow-- I have not heard that one before. So creative! :) However, I am wondering how you would go about translating your topic into this genre… I know you mentioned including a story along with the pictures, but what would its purpose be? Will it simply tell a story, or is it meant to be educational/convey a message? Either way, I can tell it’s going to be cool. Now talking about your older audience, I’m liking the tumblr post idea. There are so many facets of a tumblr page, like the color scheme used, the format of the text, and the visuals that are incorporated into each post and the page itself. Like you said, it’s such an artsy, expressive platform, which I think will give you a lot of room for creativity, while also allowing you to set the tone for the content and purpose of your blog. Anyways, good luck on this WP, I think you’ll knock it outta the park!
ReplyDelete