TOW Reflection

Ever since starting these TOW’s, the way I’ve approached them has changed.  In the beginning with my very first TOW, A First: Organs Tailor-Made With Body’s Own Cells, I was very focused on following the parameters of the assignment, simply because I had no idea what leeway was allowed.  It was safe to just hit everything on the list and be done.  So we get very formulaic writing.  Author, author background information, tiny summary, rhetorical devices and analysis, then add a little bit about his purpose and done! Double-check to make sure that I didn’t use too many words for the TOW, check the article again for word count, its all good, lets post it on the pretty blog with pink flowers and hummingbirds.  Why choose that for a background?  Well, as much as I wished to make it orange, most people somehow find bright orange and blue an eyesore, and the color scheme worked, so might as well, and the autumn leaves were kind of garish, so better to just stick with the pink flowers. at least there’s SOME orange... But of course, this type of writing only lasted to about the second marking period, where the class received a notice to actually do GOOD writing.  

There were no limits on the number of words, hallelujah, because sometimes I went over and had to cut, but then there was more thought added in because the ideas should flow, instead of just acting as an information dump.  Cut and paste, choppy, little flow between ideas, that was how the oldest TOW’s were like, but my rewrite of the TOW on the advertisement for the The Phantom of the Opera at Royal Albert Hall: In Celebration of 25 years was more story-like.  It was less a fact dump and more a story, albeit one based upon a picture, but are not those fun stories?  You can say whatever you want as long as you have evidence to back up your point of view, as sometimes there really is no right or wrong interpretation.  With the word count limitation removed, there was more room to think and express.  Yes, there was less, some things get cut out or pushed back as unimportant to the audience, but that’s the point, right? To learn how to express things concisely in a way that is interesting and use one’s own judgement to utilise rhetorical tools in one’s own writing, even if subconsciously, while studying how others use their tools so that we may emulate them in our own writing should we have need to do so.  

The blogs, as they went on, became less of an impersonal chore, but a way to share interpretations.  In my Student Debts Cartoon post, I found myself connecting with my choice, as a soon-to-be college student, and my writing reflected my own personal opinions that I found were reflected in the cartoon.  The more formal tone adopted in my first few posts had mostly fled, and it was as if I were talking to someone else while writing.  Of course, any responses to my words were only in my head, but it was still a nice way to go about it...

To say I’ve mastered something about blog writing is probably going too far.  I can say that I’ve improved in identifying rhetorical elements and analyzing them in writing, but I’m sure there will always be plenty of room to improve.  Identifying the purpose goes a long way in helping to write posts, and while I’ve gotten the hang of identifying the purpose of visual texts, I still have a long way to go with journal articles.  Not many of them are obvious in purpose, and while one can always argue one purpose or another based upon evidence in the article, it will never be the same as taking a peek at the author’s brain and actually knowing and understanding the purpose of an article.  I do feel as though the flow has gotten better, since it isn’t quite as much an information dump.  I’ve still got much to learn, and it’d be nice if I actually got some feedback on my work, but I suppose it’s not that good if I don’t get any sort of commentary.  Still, I’ve definitely improved since the beginning of the year, so I’m happy.