Unit 3 Reflection

Unit 3 Reflection 

1. How did you choose your genre/medium for your Unit 3 Project? What specific attributes of your argument and your projected audience helped you arrive at that decision?

1. Adriana: This project was very fun and engaging as it encouraged us to get outside of our comfort zone and try a different medium to express the research we found. We chose the medium for a podcast because we wanted to set a casual tone for our listeners and portray ourselves as a relatable voice. We wanted the audience to feel as though they are listening to a personal conversation as we dove into a topic that we are extremely familiar with. Our argument about social media affecting coursework is something that we experience on a daily basis as Sophomores in college and a podcast felt like the best medium to express our opinions while also backing them up with our findings. 

2. Alexia: I think we kind of came up with it together, and I would say that it was kind of planted a bit ago when we listened to a podcast for a class assignment, and how we had to listen and engage with that. I liked the idea of having a conversation, and being able to talk things through, it's easier to keep an audience engaged and listening when you are able to have a flow of conversation that allows for some freedom to bounce around, rather than writing or a presentation that kind of has to move in a certain linear direction, and that can get monotonous and hard to keep an audience engaged, which was something I really wanted to have was the audiences attention. 

2. How did you submit your Unit 3 Project to your projected audience? What cover/introductory materials did you provide? Create a narrative, starting with your pitch, about how you and your audience interacted (and it’s okay if it’s a one-way interaction, meaning that you didn’t hear back). Ideally, how would you like your audience to use/respond to/be inspired by your Unit 3 Project?

1. Adriana: We are going to submit our Unit 3 project through posting the podcast to our tik tok where we follow many other Syracuse students and we hope that others will relate and know they are not alone in their struggles with balancing college with so many external factors. When looking at our individual pitches one of them was a google form that was filled out by numerous students with differing majors and coursework. I then sent this data to the Student Outreach Center at Syracuse, but did not get a response. This pitch helped us think about what kind of impact we wanted to make with our research. We knew that with our podcast we wanted to inspire reflection but not create judgment on students. Through expressing our own struggles and explaining that this is a normal occurrence maybe we could inspire growth rather than shame. We know how it feels to be so overwhelmed that even starting coursework seems like an impossible task and it’s so much easier just to pretend that it does not exist and doom-scroll for hours. However, it is always possible to improve bad habits and use other coping strategies to relieve stress and improve time management. Another important take away we wanted to give was that social media is designed to get you hooked and make you spend time there so feeling guilty is not always necessary. With our generation we need to learn self discipline and understand that what we want in the moment is not always what we need in the long run. 

2. Alexia: For my pitch, I sent a letter to a friend, slipped it right under her door while she was in class. My other Unit topics have always been about hobbies, but Unit 2 specifically was about how social media ruins hobbies and makes hobbies more of a marketplace than something organic and natural. So when me and Adri worked together we combined our Unit 2 ideas and I sacrificed the hobbies aspect and applied that knowledge I gained about social media / social media usage to help support our ideas of how that affects schoolwork and time management. We wanted to deliver something that felt raw and real and something that they can relate to, not just an analyzed piece of research that kind of spews out facts, but something that is relatable and can help other students realize they're not alone.

3. Directly quote at least one comment that one of your classmates posted on your blog during peer review/unit reflection from any of the three units. Then describe, with direct quotes, how this comment influenced your writing (and it doesn’t have to be because you agreed with the comment). (In the rare occasion that you didn’t receive any peer feedback, you may use a piece of feedback from me -- otherwise please use feedback from someone else in class.)

1. Adriana: One comment of feedback I have received on a Unit 2 draft was “I really like how well you explained your sources for your paper, it was really insightful for what you will be using and how in your paper, I would suggest that you use one or two more sources, but because this is a draft I'm guessing you will! good luck, this looks like it's going to be really good.” This comment made me realize that it is important to make sure that you have an abundance of sources to fact check yourself and provide numerous angles to view your topic. Without a sufficient amount of sources people will be less likely to trust the information you are saying. This influenced my writing to have more evidence that backs my claims rather than just opinion pieces. I think that there needs to be a balance between opinions and fact even in an informational casual podcast like the one we created. 

2. Alexia: One comment of feedback I got was on my Unit 1 draft and was as follows “I liked reading your source analysis. I like how it is organized and how you have unique source options. One suggestion is to expand on the quotes that you put down and add your own interpretation to it.” I used this quote for my work on both UNit 2 and 3, it really stuck in my head because I knew my quotes would be stronger the more I expanded on them (without overdoing it) and it would only help my work, and add my own opinions and thoughts. Especially because, for research or thesis papers, the quote isn’t always what matters, it's more how you use it or spin it to support your thesis and narrative. This helped me realize I wasn’t helping myself at all by under-explaining a quote I used in my papers. 

4. How did you challenge yourself to improve your blog in terms of the expectations of your chosen audience?

1. Adriana: This course has definitely helped us to learn how to research and collect a variety of different sources. With our Unit 3 project we wanted to synthesize our research into an easily digestible piece that communicates our opinions as well as rigorous research. This podcast features us laughing and joking around while also having serious points of conversation and vulnerability. Sometimes it is difficult to admit struggles such as procrastination or dependency on social media, but through talking about it our audience can feel more validated. 

2. Alexia: I had wanted to have something that was more researched and factual, but delivered in a way that could be easily understood in both the sense of vocabulary and conversation, but also not so formal that you have to sit down and read it. A podcast you can listen to while cleaning or doing chores, it’s something to pass the time that can be informative and relatable. All of these features are things I wanted to deliver for our audience considering we are delivering this to other busy college students who could most likely relate. 

5. Reflection of blog improvements:

1. Alexia: I was the one who worked more on the blog, as that's how the work ended up splitting and I was fine with that. I think we really improved our blog with some pictures, which doesn’t sound like much of an improvement but we originally had just the questions and quotes and it seemed too dreary and not as fun or interesting to follow along with our work. It was more interesting, and professional as some images were ‘sources’ or a form of backup to our quotes and improved our argument (we hope). I think we also improved on our actual performance while speaking in the blog, as the first draft got deleted and we had to rerecord our work, which was quite frustrating, but also we were able to have a less awkward conversation and I think it had more flow, although it was a little less organic / natural conversation because we had just had it before and were doing it again. But because there was nothing we could do about losing our first draft, it kind of became a win - lose situation, but I think we both still had a lot of fun in the filming and editing process.