Letter to self - Nov. 2

Andrew Rehling

WRT 150

Rinke

November 2, 2012

Correcting what became a mistake

            Back in the 8^th grade, I played for a hometown Catholic league football team in Walled Lake. Our team: the St. William Crusaders, and unlike most other of my friends from middle school that played public school football, we didn’t take it as a joke. Playing football was an extreme passion and if you didn’t agree with this idea and if you didn’t try hard or play with heart, you didn’t play. It was that simple. I was one of the football captains for our varsity team, I felt a good amount of responsibility for helping keep the team up and trying to set an example for how hard the team should work and also trying to keep a great, positive mentality to keep the team going. Throughout our season we were doing great. We were a high ranked undefeated team. No team was under estimated and each week the teams only became harder and harder and we continued to struggle but we were all confident that we would go on to win our entire division. We had one more game to play before we were division champions and we could go on to playoffs. The team we had to play was notorious for trash talking and playing cheap. We knew this; we’ve played them before in previous years so that didn’t scare us. Compared to the other teams that we’d played recently, they were supposed to be a lot easier, so there was some room for underestimation in a lot of us, even me. We were all a little nervous during pregame just seeing the height of some of their guys compared to ours, but there was always this type of tension before you actually began hitting them.

            As soon as the game started, they began the cheap shots on us and trash talking, but this was different. They were trying to start fights. They tried to piss off some of us to make us look bad, and when they weren’t they continued to intimidate us any way that they could. As ridiculous as it sounds now, it worked. We were new to this and most of the other teams that we played were all cleaner than this. We started fumbling the ball, made late hits, and overall just looked horrible. Our starting star fullback had to be taken out of the game for a good portion of the second quarter; he couldn’t stop vomiting from whatever fear he had felt. It had to be the worst game I had ever played, when it was over I felt embarrassed, and overall I was deeply upset with myself.

            It still frustrates me to this day. We could’ve done so much better, they were nothing more than cheap shots and trash talk and we let it get the best of us. It was absolute garbage, the other team didn’t even make good on their threats and played as sloppy as we did even as they were trying, and falling for anything that they did was a huge mistake.

             If I could write a letter to myself and send it back to my younger, 8^th grade self and prevent us from losing due to fear, these are some of the topics that I would cover as far as advice to myself. First off, since we were beating them by a few points at half time, I would have tried to gather the team at half time and tried to calm them down first since we were all overwhelmed. Second, I would’ve said something to try to motivate them, and tell them not to listen to what they were all saying because we were still in the game. All we need to do is just drown their voices out and hit the guys across from them as hit as they could. Nothing that they were saying mattered. We were the better team. Finally I would carry out what I was saying. Help make a play on offensive or make some big tackle on defense. Do something, anything, to help bring a positive attitude back to the team. Get them pumped up anyway that I could.

            Losing this game has been a mistake that has bothered me for years now. It was a horrible way to end our season and it’s a mistake that I really wish I could go back and change through something as simple as writing a letter to myself so that I knew, and we all knew what to prepare for.

Ad Reflection - Nov. 2

Andrew Rehling

WRT 150

Rinke

November 2, 2012

Advertisement reflection

            Going into this assignment, I was a little nervous about trying to get this assignment done. The page length of five to seven pages seemed pretty hard to achieve and I didn’t have a full understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos pertaining to an advertisement. Besides most of the requirements I thought it was quite interesting and exciting thinking about and trying to decide how I could redesign an ad. There were many ideas that were sort of running around in my head about I how I can could do this assignment. I used an issue of Sports Illustrated and figured that I will be easy to redesign an ad that was target for youth males because I fit into that audience which would make it easier to take apart and redesign. Also, if I found an ad that was interesting to me, it would make the assignment a lot less stressful to work on and hopefully keep that assignment interesting and nothing dreadful.

 I tried to look for a very basic type of advertisement after almost using the funniest advertisement that I could find. Originally, I was planning on using a Snickers ad that really appealed to my interest. I thought it was perfect, except there was nothing about it I really wanted to change, thus making a redesign more difficult, so I found a very basic looking ad. When I found how bland and boring the JVC ADIXXION ad looked, I figured that that ad just needed the redesign. There wasn’t much special about it, unless you are a diehard extreme sports fan but other than that there no good attention grabbers that I noticed, so I figured it would be easy to take apart and remake for a different audience.

            For the redesign, I tried to picture a few different types of audiences that would like the ad. The two I thought of right away were for female or family audiences. I wanted to include humor into the ad to be an attention grabber so I figured that would be easier to achieve if I was targeting just a female audience, so I focused on visualizing a funny scenario that included the family and show off how durable the camera is at the same time. I had two pictures in my head of the average middle class like family that went for a bike ride in pouring rain, or skiing in midst of a blizzard; a couple of extreme environments to help advertise the durability of the camera as well as get attention. I couldn’t decide which one I liked more, so I used both for the ad.

Some challenges of starting the essay were where to begin. I was originally going to get to the point of the essay, no introductions, but if I were to do this, I wouldn’t give much of a background on what I am doing, or show what I have learned about advertisements and their redesigns. I liked the amount of creativity that was involved with this. When I can open up my thoughts, opinions, and my imagination, usually that makes an assignment easier, fun, and it feels like it’s more worth doing. I learned how to break down advertisements, make assessments, and changes, and how to figure out a certain audience, and how to address one too. If I did get the chance to rewrite this essay, I would try to make everything transition and flow better with everything that I had talked about, instead of all the clean cut facts and details that I felt I put into an almost listing type of format.

October 10th Blog

October 10, 2012

                The Nissan Leaf commercial communicates the important of helping save the environment by buying the car advertised. Nowadays, the environment seems to concern most people in today’s society and most of us have heard about polar ice caps melting due to global warming which is mostly caused by the emissions given off by gas powered vehicles. The ideology is that if you buy this car, you’ll help save the environment. They show the polar bear, which represents the environment, making a long journey to thank the man who bought this electric vehicle with a literal bear hug. The intended audience are people that care about the well-being of the environment and its animals. Again the polar bear is being used as this representation of the environment. It grabs attention at first by showing ice caps melting and a polar bear watching it with the intention on making it a sad, melancholy sight. The bear hug at the end shows that something is being done with compassion. To me, this is a dominant-hegemonic reading and that I can agree with the position of the commercial along with the point they’re trying to get across, plus the audience that they are targeting.

Literacy Memo

Andrew Rehling

WRT 150

Rinke

October 11, 2012

Literacy Narrative Process Memo

           

            When I first began thinking about my timeline to help develop my narrative, I thought that it would be appropriate that I started with some of the books I read when I was a lot younger and I tried to think back as far as I could with some of these books. Now thinking back to something I liked or had trouble reading 13 years ago isn’t always easy. I sorted through quite a few major books or other things that I read. What came to my mind almost immediately were the books in the I Spy series. I read other books at the time, but there were no other books I enjoyed more than those. With the I Spy books came back other memories that involved them, such as having my mom help me read them for the first time, how I always wanted to go to the library to check them out and read through all of them, how I brought them into my preschool or kindergarten classes, or even the I Spy CD-ROMs that were available at the library, I only picked a couple of these memories for my narrative that were the most relevant to topic. I knew that talking about I Spy wouldn’t be enough to fill the required amount of time, and it would also get kind of boring after a while, so I thought about readings I might have had trouble with and what came to me was the time I had struggled to read a Superman comic book. Now back when I was 3-6 years old ago, I was a huge fan of Superman. It was my favorite Halloween costume and TV show to watch at the time, so when I saw a superman comic book at Toys R Us, I knew I had to have it. All I liked about it at first were the pictures and different action shots. I knew it was a story but I couldn’t figure out what it was unless I actually read it. Then I began to recall my memories of struggling to read my read comic book by myself due to how the pictures and speech bubbles were formatted on the pages. I wasn’t anything that I was used to, so I thought that all these details would be interesting to talk about along with this literacy experience.

            At first I was going to connect these experiences based on the fact that were involved with a few types of hobbies or interests that I had, but that idea seemed a bit too vague, so as I began thinking on these two topics I realized that what helped me develop literacy was my interest in pictures and how I made connections between the pictures and the words on the pages. I didn’t really make this connection at first but it makes sense now figuring out what my motivation was to actually sit down and make attempts at reading. The connection between pictures and words and creating a motivation for me became my central theme for the paper that I addressed a little bit in my introduction and recapped on it in my conclusion and because of some of these memories I focused on, it wasn’t hard to explain or pick this theme. The creation of my timeline helped me realize that the relation between pictures and words was a big part of my developing literacy.

            I narrowed down my narrative by the two biggest points of my timeline which were the I Spy books and the Superman comic. It wasn’t hard and very straight forward as far as my thinking went and I didn’t have much on my timeline to work with in the first place. The whole concept of relating words and pictures came to me shortly after the idea of starting my narrative talking about the large role I Spy books had played as a child. When I began writing up my narrative, I just used a chronological order to the events that I had discussed. I found that it would be easier and a lot more organized if I did it this way and didn’t just idea-hop all over my timeline piece fragments of the complete ideas together. It wasn’t too difficult drafting up my ideas. I just wanted to keep focusing on little ideas without getting too repetitive or having the paper sounding too dry and boring. Probably the only pre-writing strategy that I had used before drafting or even making my timeline was a little bit of brainstorming that I did in my head. Now, I’m not sure if it’s considered brainstorming if I don’t write it down; I have never been a fan of writing my ideas down before I start a paper unless I was afraid that I was going to forget about them, but I kept a few key ideas in mind and while I wrote them down on my timeline, the ideas that I was almost certain that I was going to use in my paper or that had the most relevance to one other, I would putt more in detail down about those, so there would be paragraphs on ideas that I really liked and just a sentence or two and ideas I thought about including, but ultimately did not use. In a way, I thought of the creation of my timeline as a prewriting technique to sort of reference back to in case I did get lost, or if I did forget a detail or two.

            After the peer review I realized how others have similar literacy origins as me, but what they did was included almost their entire timelines, whereas I only focused on two specific events in my childhood. Others where on to reflect back to hobbies and interest just as I was going to do with my draft and talked about their outcomes of how they are present day because of growing up reading or how they felt about reading. I never even thought once about touching base on how I am today because of this reading materials and developing literacy… Heck, I didn’t even make it past the age of six in my draft. Thoughts popped up in my head wondering if I talked about enough or did I address too little in my draft. I didn’t get much criticism for my paper. Mostly the transitions weren’t really there and there a few sentences where words were jumbled up, or thoughts were incomplete; that’s all. During the final edits, I already had a good idea what sentences I was going to use in my slideshow, it was all a matter trimming out minor details and I already kind of did that in my head when I was reviewing my draft.

            Out of the 15 chosen sentences that were highlighted in my draft, I chose maybe seven or eight of those. No offense to Jake, but It seemed like he picked the sentences that sounded really good or cool, but if condensed down to summarize my paper it would make for a weird flowing idea or concept. I sorted through the sentences and referred back to the ideas throughout the draft and didn’t really pick the greatest details given, but the sentences that would complete my idea with a great understanding of what my draft was about. It was hard meeting character limits for the text slide, I down right hated those; and my strategy?  Write like a kindergartener.  Try not to describe if you couldn’t and keep everything as simple as possible. My image were like a nice little break from reading the simple text slides and kept a nice relation with the point I tried to get across while keeping attention with the detail of imagery, and also everyone love pictures of you as a kid (especially if you’re dressed up like Superman). Most of my images were personal because I feel those are the best. My song was a slow, easy going song that may not have a large effect but helped keep the tempo and pace of the slideshow. It helped communicate that my literacy was a slow process much like the song used.

            What I would’ve done differently would be to cover less ground and try to expand more with my timeline and add more events to my literacy development. I’m sure that there’s more that I could think if I thought about it hard enough. I would try to make it less dry and clean up the details and take out those that do not significantly help prove my point.

Digital literacy today

September 24, 2012

                "Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t keep ignoring the formidable cognitive skills they’re developing on their own. And above all, we must stop disparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen to possess it. An institutional grudge match with the young can sabotage an entire culture."

-Dustin Anderson

The future is literacy stands before all of us today in the world. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and online games are just a few examples of digital literacy through very popular forms of communication. In school, these things are seen as the enemy of communal skills and socialization. Most adults will see view this type of cultural with some negativity and disregard the importance of the digital literacy that is seen just about everywhere in today’s world. Much of the youth today are developing most of their own cognitive skills today by what they read, see, or hear over the internet most of the time. They can interact by leaving comments and statuses posing their own voice, ideas, and opinions. Much of these people are very influential to the progression of digital literacy. So, why can’t most people ages 40 and over see the same thing positive aspects as those that the youth can? It can be difficult if one is not born and or raised into this type of culture. The technological progress that is occurring in this generation is far faster and advanced than that of the last century. Older people will not see the same things in the social communication today as someone who hears about it all the time from friends and other sources. Postal mail and land-line phone calls are becoming outdated. When you ask for the time, what do you see more: people checking their watches if they have one, or people checking their phones?

Digital literacy can be seen with negative aspects by a lot of people that disregard it or don’t understand it as well as younger people. Social skills, new means of communication, and new cultures are progressing every day thanks to today’s digital literacy.