For this weeks writers blog I wanted to talk about the slides that we looked over in class on Monday and Friday. I found these really helpful for considering my feature story. I have not started writing yet but I think the powerpoints we were given really help to get a starting point. In Mondays powerpoint was the acronym BEAM which stands for background, exhibit, argument, and method. I thought this was a good way at looking at sources and how you can use information differently. I plan to use the BEAM method when I am looking at different pieces and trying to decide how to use them in my short feature story.
I found the article that we read about marriages and housework very interesting. When I think about my own household, my parents equally split work. Growing up it was actually my dad who did more of the taking me to appointments and household stuff. My mom always traveled for work so I think my parents definitely do not exemplify the stereotypical household gender roles.
When we did the descriptive outlining exercise, my writing group was able to understand the framework of the writing. We said that at the root of the writing, the author did the basic outline of heres the problem, heres evidence to support the problem, personal experience, heres what you should do to change this, and lastly a conclusion.
This is essentially the same framework that I plan to follow in my short feature story. I want to introduce the voting access problem and show data to back it up, and then present solutions. I will not be able to include my own experience because I dont have any but I think if I can find descriptive, concrete evidence,it will support the problem well. I think this is a good way to present a social problem and what people should do to change it.
My group also talked about using hyperlinks and quotes in our pieces. These are things I plan to use but have not decided which sources and information yet. I think the short feature piece will be relatively easy and interesting to work on. The only worry I have when it comes to actually writing it is not writing it like a research paper. I am so used to writing long formal research papers and not so much writing pieces like this. I think this will be really interesting for me to write something similar but also different at the same time. I plan to do my research on the problem and solutions and make a detailed outline of how I want my piece to go. After this I will then start writing. I have not started writing yet because I am not sure how to start my paper. I think doing the outline first and the descriptive outline for my sources will help me have a more clear idea of my piece.
