Reflections

Final Reflection

It is expected to write papers in an English class, and therefore that is what I expected out of English 250. However this course has aided me in improving many different aspects of communication which will be directly involved in my future career. While I personally believe that I grew and made improvements as a communicator during this semester, I also believe that communication is not something you can perfect. Communication is constantly changing and evolving, and there is always room for improvement. In order to succeed in the public relations field I need to continue to better myself as a communicator and listener both in the classroom and the professional realm.

Evaluating my strengths and weaknesses based on the work I have done this semester, I see that some of my forms of communication need more work than others. I have more confidence in my written communication than some of the other forms that I don’t use quite as much such as formal oral communication which is noticeable in my work. I hope to continue to improve my oral communication skills as I move forward, and I plan on doing that simply by forcing myself out of my comfort zone more often in order to gain more experience. As far as written communication goes I feel confident that I have found my voice in the classroom setting, but rarely change my voice to better suit the audience. This also will come with time, and I plan to practice this as I continue in English and higher level public relations courses, as well as writing for the Iowa State Daily. Working for the Daily has really helped me to stop continuously writing in the same style, as I have to tailor the message to the platform and story. If the story is made to be pushed out as a quick social media story rather than a full news article it must be written in a different way. My electronic and visual communication definitely are not up to speed with my other forms of communication as I simply haven’t had to use them very often. This is apparent in my visual analysis video, where even though I felt confident in the words I was saying I struggled to find graphics to match with what I was saying. This also will come with time, but this is something that I will probably have to make myself work on outside of class in order to truly improve these forms of communication and get them to the level that I want to feel secure as I pursue my career. Up to this point I haven’t had to use this communication very often other than a few Powerpoint presentations, and unless it becomes more frequent in future classes I don’t think the class time alone will allow me to fully develop my visual and electronic communication. I look forward to bettering my communication in its many different forms for different audiences, because I strongly believe that the more confident I feel in the communication process I use, the better my final product tends to be.

Looking back I have made major improvements not only in my final products of communication but also in the process in which I form these products. While there is always room for improvement and there are some forms of communication that I haven’t quite gotten the hang of, I feel reassured when I look at where I started at the beginning of the semester to where I am now. Improving communication is difficult and not always a perfect upward slope, but as I face problems and obstacles it better prepares me for the next time and my career. I am thankful for the improvements I have made and am excited for where my communication skills can go.

Planning

Annotated Bibliography

Thesis

Due to the many dangers that humans have posed on the tigers in Asia, the wild tiger is terrifyingly close to extinction.

Source 1:

WWF is an organization that studies and helps protects wildlife. This page is devoted specifically to tigers and the habitats in which they live. This page is full of research and quantitative data. WWF is one of the leading organizations in wildlife conservation and has years of experience and thousands of trained professionals to ensure that their data is correct. I plan on using this source for many of the statistical facts that are important to know regarding my topic.

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Visual

Rhetorical Visual Analysis

At the beginning of this project I was having some trouble deciding what to do the visual analysis on. I then saw this ad campaign and became inspired to create the video on this topic. When choosing which rhetorical devices to focus, on I simply just chose the ones that seemed to be the most prevalent. The two that I chose to analyze were contrast and perspective elements. I feel like these two were a huge part of what gave the ad campaign its identity and was the difference between a successful and unsuccessful outcome. The contrast of the colors and lighting focused the attention of the viewers to the important aspects of the campaign such as the logo and hashtag in order to get their message spread. The perspective elements and camera angles allow the photo to get the message to the viewer in the most efficient manner by keeping the important factors in the center of the photo. Since consumers tend to ignore ads when they can and only look at them for a few seconds, it’s important to keep the vital aspects within their view to get that message to them in the short amount of time they spend to look at it.

PlanningReflections

Video Analysis Pre-reflection

Question 1

Yes, I have had to create videos for other courses and feel confident in my ability to do so, although videos are one of my least favorite media types to personally create. I believe that my previous experiences will definitely help me.

Question 2

I’m fairly comfortable with different video creating programs but the one I feel the most confident in and the one I will be using for this assignment is Windows Media Maker.

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Responses

HISHE Visual Analysis

How Wonder Woman Should Have Ended

  • The purpose of the video is to provide entertainment to the audience by making jokes about the story line of the movie. The audience is people who have seen the movie and have some background knowledge regarding super heroes and the justice league.
  • The tone is very light and playful, as the video is simply meant to entertain the audience for a few short minutes of their day.
  • The visual style provides a huge element of this video. Using cartoon characters with choppy motion provides another layer of comedy as most movies go out of their way to provide the most realistic visual quality as possible.
  • The voice ties in with the visual style as the characters need to sound enough like the characters in the actual movie, but also not too much as to make it seem serious.

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Reflections

Analysis Reflection

The strategy I used to select an article for this assignment was to simply find one that interested me within the topic I was given. My group’s current subject is entertainment, so I chose to focus on movies, and more specifically the latest movie I saw in theaters: Dunkirk. I found an article by ScreenRant that explained the plot line of the movie since many people found it confusing. I am glad that I used this process to select my article, as my personal interest made it much easier to analyze the text. The author’s strategies that I chose to focus on were organization and substance as those two immediately stood out to me the most while reading the article. Personally, I did not think the article fulfilled its purpose to its potential, and organization and substance were the two biggest reasons why. My thesis clearly stated this and did not change throughout my analysis, and I don’t believe that it needed to.

Since it was a short article and not a long text, I did not annotate or write any sort of notes on the article. I simply left the article open on another tab and referred back to it whenever needed. I did struggle some with deciding whether to cover the topic of organization or substance first, but eventually came to a conclusion. I ended up covering organization first because most of my problems with the substance occurred at the end with the analysis section of the piece, whereas the organization covered the entire article. Originally I had these two topics switched but it did not flow as well as I wanted it to, and eventually changed it when making the final draft.

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Written

Homeless man uses social media

General Response

Overall this article was heartwarming and very inspiring. I was pleasantly surprised by how invested I was in this man and his life story. Seeing someone go to such lengths to advocate on the behalf of others is something that is not seen that often in today’s ‘dog eat dog’ society. I think the author did a great job of portraying an inspiring story and delivering it in such a way that grasped the attention of the reader.

Analysis

In my opinion the single most effective element of this article was the author’s use of pathos. He immediately begins the article by illustrating the rough background from which Eric Sheptock comes from, which grabs the attention of the reader as well as pulls on their heart strings.  The author then shifts to a positive appeal for the pathos with a story of redemption and human kindness. Sheptock went from being a crack addict living on the street to actively sacrificing basic human necessities in order to aid the people in the situation that he was in for so many years. The use of quotes from Sheptock himself allow the reader to have a window into his mind, and to connect on a personal level which only makes the article more effective.

Planning

Textual Analysis Pre-assignment

This analysis assignment will differ from the summary yet they still share many of the same basic principles. In order for there to be an analysis, one must have an in depth and complete understanding of the text, and therefore a summary is needed. However the summary is no longer the main focus, so it is important to keep the summary down to the essentials and spend more time on the analysis. Although I feel relatively comfortable with analysis due to the amount of time I have spent on it in the last few years of school, I still find analysis more difficult than summary in the fact that I am breaking it down even farther into the dynamics of the writing such as diction and syntax. I plan on starting my analysis by taking the time to find an article that is right for both the topic and myself. Since analysis is a more drawn out and tedious form of writing than summarizing I need to make sure to select an article with enough material to sift through. In my summary assignment I chose to create an outline of the summary, get a peer review of the outline, and then write the summary itself. Although the peer review was very helpful and assisted in shaping the summary to what I wanted it to be, I do believe that I need to change the process in order to better suit this assignment. I plan on writing an entire first draft before subjecting it to a peer review and then making any changes necessary from there. I believe that this will allow me to use the peer review more effectively, as the reader reviewing my draft has an entire copy of my writing to critique as opposed to an outline which simply covers the main points.

Reflections

Summary Assignment Reflection

Starting this assignment I underestimated how difficult summarizing this article would be. 250 words doesn’t seem like much, and summarizing is a skill that most students use all the time. However the element that made this assignment so difficult for me personally was the length of the article. Compared to a 5 page essay 250 words is nothing, but when the material used to summarized is a short article with less than 500 words itself rather than an entire novel it becomes much more challenging than it seems at first glance. The biggest obstacle that came with such a short article was trying to go into as much depth as possible to really portray the main message of the article without using the author’s words. If I was to do this assignment again I would definitely choose a longer article that provided more information to summarize.

A piece of advice that I received from the peer review was to cut down on the number of topics to cover in order to be able to spend more time on the remaining topics and provide the reader with a deeper understanding. Taking this recommendation to heart, I decided to cover what I felt were the two most important points of the article, rather than three. I strongly believe that this allowed me to develop the aspects of my summary further and is what I would consider one of the stronger elements of my summary.

One part of the article that was surprising at first but helpful in the end was the video included in the article. This allowed me to have more information than simply just the short article, and provided another viewpoint since the video was a clip from a news broadcast. Without this video I may have run out of material to summarize and had to choose a new article entirely.