Reflection of Short Assignment 2- Critical Media Engagement

Short Assignment 2 was designed to have two outcomes. The first was that we would be able to identify rhetorical elements in a text and decide what works and what doesn’t work. The second is that we would be able to contribute to conversations about the piece of media we found and what worked and what didn’t work about it. Much like my first draft of Short Assignment 1, I was not specific enough about pretty much everything in my first draft like you mentioned. So again, I went back a few months later, after everything we have learned and made quite a few revisions. 

For this piece of work, most of my revisions revolved around my lack of specificity, but not all. When I reread my first draft the first time after a few months it felt as if I were missing parts of the sentences. I was not actually missing anything grammatically, but I was missing the part of the sentences that had substance. The analysis. An example of a revision from my first draft to my final would be this. In my first draft, when I was talking about how Fortnite was getting worse and worse I said, “Once Fortnite started using outside sources to promote the game, it became much too cluttered and there was constantly too much going on.” There simply is nothing to work with there. This sentence could be drawn from my topic sentence and I didn’t add any new information. However, once I revised it, it turned into this, “Once Fortnite started using outside sources to promote the game, it became much too cluttered and there was constantly too much going on. For example, when Fortnite did a collaboration with Avengers, they included jetpacks in the game which were extremely unfair and nobody enjoyed them. Even if you stumbled upon one mid-game, it would be no fun because it was way too unfair.” This really helps go beyond answering the questions that were in the prompt and giving the reader that much more information for them to be able to side with me and think, “You know what? You are right. The game really used to be so much better.” I needed to continue to support my overall message and with no evidence like I added there, my essay was going nowhere.

There was one really big revision I made from my first to my final draft. My first draft included a part that I thought I had to add because it was part of the rubric. It was a paragraph talking about how the game didn’t really convey any sort of message and I had to make a few stretch statements that didn’t flow or fit along with the rest of the essay so the best thing for me to do was completely take out that paragraph and focus or really making the other paragraphs that much better. This was really a focus of Outcome 1 because I sort of had to play around with the structure of my essay. At first, I tried to move the paragraph with stretch statements and make them sound a little bit smoother but I ended up deciding that the best thing for me to do was take it out completely.

Final Version

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vuyy3hZk8nA-RrtboEX2NisGK4jomSofcp4QFwxjGtM/edit?usp=sharingLinks to an external site.