Reflection of Redesign Essay

Going into this assignment, at first I had a hard time finding an advertisement because with most advertisements I couldn’t think of a way to redirect them toward a different audience. I eventually found a Popchips advertisement in Seventeen that I felt was pretty easy to redirect. After that, I felt pretty confident. I had an idea of what I was going to do and I thought it would be easy to write. Once I started writing my rough draft, though, I lost that confidence. I couldn’t seem to elaborate on my thoughts in order to make the essay long enough. I didn’t know how to go in enough detail about the use of rhetoric either. It was very helpful and when we were in class and we came up to the professor one by one with questions. It helped me organize my essay more and understand how pathos, ethos, and logos were used in the original ad. I still was never able to make the essay long enough. When I came up with my idea for the redesign, I just pictured it in my head. Unfortunately, my first idea was already an advertisement created by the Popchips company so I had to change it. That was inconvenient because I really liked my first choice and thought it was a good advertisement. Clearly it was, since it was used by the company itself. I still liked my new idea but I don’t think it was as good as the first. I really liked that this assignment was very different than any writing assignment I’ve done before. I got to use my creative side, which is one of my strong points. It was easy for me to picture the advertisement in my head and recreate it on paper but it was just a little bit more difficult to get down on paper. If I got a second chance to write this essay, I start my rough draft by elaborating on the use of rhetoric so that my paper was long enough so that I wouldn’t have lost points. Unfortunately, losing points on the final draft was going to happen either way because I couldn’t think of enough detail to stretch it out to 5 pages. Either way, I felt like I learned more about the use of rhetoric and how to use them in visual literacy, rather than novels.

Nissan Leaf Commercial

Some major ideologies communicated in the Nissan Leaf commercial were saving the environment and friendship. The ice caps in the beginning of the commercial were melting, which represented global warming. A polar bear living in this environment traveled across the world to hug a man who was using a vehicle that didn’t use gas. It was like he was thanking him for caring about the environment and helping delay global warming. The intended audience of this argument was anyone looking for a brand new car that could be interested in vehicles that are good for the environment. To appeal to this specific audience, advertisement is trying to make the audience feel moved by this commercial. I believe this is a dominant hegemonic commercial. I strongly agree with people doing whatever they can to stop global warming. I think it’s important to care about the earth and to do any little thing we can to contribute to help save our environment. I think many people would agree with me and would be moved by this commercial and it could potentially sway them and they may consider buying a car like this.

"Reading with Dad" Process Memo

            At first when writing my literacy timeline, I had a really hard time remembering details from my childhood. It wasn’t as hard thinking about when I was a little older, but a lot of literacy development happens at such a young age that it’s hard to remember that far. A lot of my memories were just things that my parents told me about. I had no idea what I would use as my theme because I felt like after reading the literacy narratives in our book that compared to those authors I was just an average girl with nothing interesting to write about my literacy development. At first, I wasn’t really looking forward to this paper because I couldn’t really connect. But after a while I was able to come up with some memories with my dad and then I realized that I had so much to say about literacy development. It might not be as interesting as some of narratives in our book, but not everyone experiences unique childhoods. I became a little more excited about the paper when I realized my dad would be my theme. Once I started coming up with ideas, I couldn’t stop. I tried to write a timeline but I couldn’t keep the memories in order at first. It was easier for me to just keep writing them down and worry about putting them in order later. I liked this paper because before this I had never realized how much my father contributed to my literacy development. It shows how important family is to me and how much they affected me throughout my life.

            Now that I had a theme, I thought writing my narrative would be easy. It really wasn’t, though. I wrote down everything from my timeline and tried to include details but it only was a page and a half. I really felt like there wasn’t anything else to say. I didn’t want to come to class without a complete paper so I gave it to both of my parents to review and they were a huge help. They highlighted every sentence that didn’t give enough detail and they helped with any grammar problems. They also contributed by using asterisks at the bottom and writing more memories that I didn’t remember on my own. This way, when I did the peer review, my peers hardly had anything to say and it made me feel so much more confident about my paper. They still did find a few things though, and they gave me great criticism and it just made my narrative that much better.

When preparing for the video during the peer review session, it was very helpful when my partner picked out fifteen sentences for my video because it was nice to see it from another person’s point of view. I had already picked out a few sentences myself and this way I could combine both of our sentences to make a great video. Even though combined we had more than fifteen sentences, when I was making the video they didn’t sound as good as I had thought. I didn’t have very many slides at first and it was hard to cut down the sentences to 52 characters per slide without cutting the sentences in weird places. When choosing images, I was very disappointed when I couldn’t find any pictures of me reading with my dad when I was little. It made it a lot harder to make my video personal because I had more pictures of book covers and less pictures of my own family. It was also hard to find a song that was for a father and a daughter that wasn’t a wedding song. But I thought my song choice fit quite well in the end. It was a father singing to his daughter about her growing up. Since my video started from me being very young and ended with me now, I thought this was a perfect fit.

            I think I did a very good job on my literacy narrative and my Animoto slideshow. I put a lot of effort in and I took a lot of time to make it as good as it could be. After watching my video again and looking at my classmates comments, I’m still very satisfied with my video. They agreed that it would have been nice to include a picture of my father and I reading so I’m disappointed that I couldn’t find one to include. I wish I would have just taken a current one but I still don’t think that would have been what I’m looking for. Overall, I’m proud of my hard work and I hope my grade reflects that.