Letter to Myself

Dear past Nick,

                                    Do you remember that cold, crisp fall night of senior year? It was around late September/early October. It involved soccer. Still don’t know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about the night of the Shield game, the most important soccer game of your life. When Walled Lake Central Soccer versed Walled Lake Northern for The Shield. I know for a fact that you still remember how that night went. The way you felt before the game. The way you felt during the game. And especially the way you felt after the game. After losing to your arch rival school in Penalty Kicks, there is no worse feeling. Do you ever wish you knew how to correct your mistake? Well this is your future self-explaining how you could have prepared better.

             First, it all started with the lack of sleep you got. You needed way more than the usually five to six hours of sleep you usually get. You needed to drink a heck of a lot more fluids than you did. Preferably, you needed to drink water instead of Arizona or Gatorade. Even though Gatorade is a good drink, water is preferred. You also did not have to focus so much on your school work throughout the week of your game. You would have been fine not worrying about the work load.  Everything worked out in the end school-wise. This next rule could arguably be the most important. You need to limit all technology components in your life. The less technology around you, the better you be prepared for the game. Now, we have arrived to the day of the game. You need to sleep in and miss your first two classes. The extra sleep is beneficial. You don’t need to show up for teen health. It is not important. You should carry around multiple drinks around with you at all times. This will keep you hydrated and keep you from getting a headache. For lunch, you go to Coach Sharpe’s room to eat. Do not go to the cafeteria. You will just have to deal with all the annoyances of walking through the long line, finding a place to sit, the loud noise, the throwing of food, etc…. It is better to be in a calm and quiet environment. As soon as school lets out, go straight home and take a two hour nap. This will help restore some energy that you put out in school. When it comes to preparation for the game, do what you do best. Do not change anything from how you normally prepare. Be your superstitious self. At the game, before it starts, just be calm. You should take headphones and your iPod so you can listen to music. Listen to pump up music. Music that will get you psyched up for a soccer game. You need to warm up the same way you always do. Again, be superstitious. When the game starts, all you need to be is yourself. Play how you normally do. Own the box. Now for the most important part of the night, the Penalty Kicks. You must talk to no one. While you are waiting for them to start, go off and be alone. Collect your thoughts. You must make sure you are in the best state of mind possible.  You are now prepared to face the most important moment of your soccer career. If you follow all these steps, you are now able to prevent what had happened to me, your future self.

            Best of luck,

                                    Future Nick. 

Redesign Reflection

Going in to this assignment, I was pretty flabbergasted. I had no clue how I was going to get five to seven pages written about an ad.  

I finally decided on a Seiko Watch advertisement. The main reason why I decided to choose it is because Landon Donovan was in the ad. Me, being the huge soccer fan, thought it would be easy to talk about him. It was a no brainer in deciding what ad to use.

The way I came up with the redesign is I was trying to think of the opposite target audience of what I had from the original ad. The original target audience was athletically focused men. I changed the target audience to women in relationships with men. I just drew it up in my head of what I wanted and went from there.

Some challenges I faced were gathering enough material to write about for five to seven pages. I had to carefully choose the ad. I overcame them by finding an ad I could relate too easily. That made it easier for me to write.

I liked that I was able to pick out my own ad rather than have an ad chosen for me. I used to my advantage by being able to pick out an ad that I was comfortable with. If the ad was chosen for me, I may not have liked the ad. Therefore, I would have struggled with it and not have done as good on it.

What I learned from this assignment is the three rhetorical appeals: ethos, logos, and pathos. I feel that I now have a better grasp on these topics. Before this assignment, I couldn’t tell you what those meant to save my life. Now, I understand them and I can apply them to my writing.

Honestly, if I had a second chance, I would get my rough done sooner than I did. I procrastinated the writing a little too long and I felt rushed at times for writing the paper. I just need to start earlier is all.

Commercial response

Dominant-hegemonic reading: F-150 commercial

In my opinion, the F-150 commercial was going for the dominant-hegemonic view. There was no beating around the bush. The commercial straight up told you facts about the truck. The text was very straight forward. I could easily tell what the advertisement was trying to tell me.  Beliefs that are reinforced in this commercial is that the F-150 truck is the best truck there is. It is top notch, and there is nothing better than it. They list multiple traits that would categorize any truck as the best truck on the market. The intended audience for this visual would most likely be middle aged men. I’m not trying to be sexist; it’s just more men drive trucks than women do.   

*This is a reminder of the E-mails I have sent you.*

Process Memo

Nicholas Cundiff

Professor Rinke

Writing 150

12 October 2012

Writing Is a Part of You

When I sat down to start my timeline, I was stuck. I had never really been the most literate person around. The most logical place I thought of to start with, or could even remember for that matter, was my love for the movie Mary Poppins. When I was younger, I would watch that movie religiously. I was addicted.  I decided that would be the most logical place to start my timeline. It was quite difficult to remember a lot of details throughout the years. There were very few moments I could think of that I actually remembered details of the event. Something interesting that I realized is that I actually learned more things growing than I thought I did. It seemed like a lot of the things I’ve learned have been experiences from school, but really, it was out of school functions that I have learned the most from. My timeline mainly focused on movies and books. Obviously, the Mary Poppins movie was a big influence growing up. I eventually got into the American/Michigan Chiller series. I’ve read every book, and even today, if I see one I haven’t read yet, I buy it and read it. The area I decided to focus on was the areas that impacted me the most. The topic I chose was my high school communications final essay and how it made me a better writer. At first, it was difficult to pick one topic. I kept second guessing myself whether the topic would be a good one or not. Once I picked the topic I wanted, it was fairly easy to stick to the topic at hand. *The experience of making a timeline is that my life lacked literacy! Well, literacy was a factor in my life, just not as big of factor that it should have been. The timeline helped show that to me.*

For the most part, I struggled with narrowing down an area of focus for this assignment. I couldn’t ever really think of any topics in the first place. So trying to focus on one topic for a fifteen slide animoto was even more challenging. To say this more clearly, no idea really jumped out at me. When I did finally decide on a topic, my organization at the beginning severely lacked.  I was just writing down ideas for the essay as they were popping into my head. By the time I had listed all my ideas, they were completely out of order. It took me a while to put it in chronological order. It was somewhat difficult to form a draft. I listed all the main posts of my draft in to bullet list form. Then, I literally filled in sentences from that around the main points. I don’t really think I used a prewriting strategy. If I did, I am unaware of it. When I went into the peer review class day, I wasn’t really too confident with my work. It was rough and choppy at times. Thankfully, I had two awesome partners that read and corrected a lot of my wrongs. They helped me make my sentences sound smoother. It was great advice. I refined my essay that night. It sounded a whole lot better the next day reading it over. During the final stages of my editing process, I had a clear idea what sentences I was going to use for my Animoto slideshow. My peers helped me with underlining good sentences to use. I used most of the sentences they underlined, but not all of them. It altered the way I would have written it into something better. My peers helped me make my slideshow better.  

My peers did an excellent job when picking my sentences. Out of the fifteen that I use, twelve of the sentences were from what my peers picked. If my peers had not of picked their fifteen best sentences, my slideshow would not of been as good as it was (not necessarily saying it was.) The fifty-two character limit per slide made it rough to use some of my sentences. I was trying to keep one idea to one slide. That made this task even more challenging. A lot of my sentences didn’t really sound like sentences a college student would use. I ended up using a strategy of making my sentences as simple as possible. Probably not the best strategy, but it worked. The way I formatted my Animoto slideshow is it went text slide, then picture slide, etc…. The images were supposed to compliment the text slides. The images would be a reference to the slide that just came up. For example, on one of the text slides, I mentioned my teacher Mrs. Rexroat. On the picture slide, I put a picture of a teacher (I didn’t own a picture of Mrs. Rexroat.) I choose all the images for a specific reason. Each picture represented the main idea of what each text slide was portraying. I had to use all web images because I didn’t have any personal images that fit in with my slideshow. I believe that detracted from the main points of the narrative. It would have been a ton better with personal pictures rather than web images. I chose Somewhere Over The Rainbow because it is a song for hope. Somewhere down the road, things will get better. In my case, my challenge was the writing assignment for my high school communications class. Somewhere over the rainbow, my writing will get better. And it did! If I could go back and change one thing, it would be my sentences for each slide on the slideshow. I wish I had used two slides for some of my sentences instead of cramming all of it on one slide. 

*This is a reminder of the E-mails I have sent you.*