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The Writing Minor:

Repurposing, Remediation, and the Blog

Repurposing to Remediation

For our second major assignment of the semester, each student in the writing minor needed to repurpose an old paper. By that I mean, choose something we have written in the past—be it an analytical essay or a letter to a parent—and rewrite it with a new purpose for a new audience. Because I love going through my old things, I could not wait to start this assignment. I decided to repurpose an essay response I wrote on serial killers in my senior year of high school and an argumentative research paper against capital punishment I wrote freshman year at Michigan. Unfortunately, the excitement I felt at the start of the process began to wain. As I struggled to decide what medium I wanted to use for my project, I had to redo the assigment over and over. I began by writing about a real-life serial killer and ended with a comprehensive blog about the fictional television show Criminal Minds. I created my own blog for the first time and learned that 1. Creating hyperlinks and adding alt. texts to pictures is so cool and 2. Blogging is kind of like thinking out loud, which I love. By the time I went in to Ctools, literally one minute before the deadline on the due date, and pressed submit on my final repurposing project, I had created something I was proud of.

 

After repurposing my two original papers, I had to remediate my project. In other words, the blog that came out of my two original writing assignments had to again become something entirely different. For the remediation, I knew I wanted to do something about the abolition of capital punishment- a stance I've felt strongly about for as long as I can remember. Though I had my topic set in stone, I struggled with a medium for this project just as I had with the repurposing assignment. I went from wanting to create a tumblr to making my very first iMovie. I had no idea how much work my iMovie, an ad campaign to abolish capital punishment, would take. At the beginning, I thought I would just put a bunch of emotionally engaging pictures together, talk over them, and call it a movie. Well, that's not what happened.  As a perfectionst, every step took hours. From editing all of the clips until they reached an appropriate length to ensuring my voice sounded serious without being overdramatic, I wanted everything in the video to appear as it did in my head. To my surprise, it actually did. As happy as I was with the turnout, I knew I had more to do. I didn't jsut want to throw a viewer into this passionate, extremely bias video about the death penalty; I needed to give them some background. To do this, I made a simple and easy-to-navigate infographic comprised of data about states with and without the death penalty. I learned to use different graph templates and settings in order to make the infographic as interactive as possible. By the end of the remediation project I couldn't believe what I had done. Wow, I thought. I made an iMove and an infographic, two things I've never even attempted to create. And I did it well. I am so happy with the way my remediation turned out; I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it!

 

 

 

 

 

Click here to read my posts on our class blog!

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