Thlog #8

This week, we worked on coming up with ideas for WP3 and reviewing different moves and decisions that artists make, as seen in our readings. On Monday, we came up with a list of ideas for sub-genres within magazines. Even though I've read magazines before, I wouldn't have thought that some of these were considered to be different genres. I had considered them all to be articles and hadn't really noticed that there are significant differences, even between very similar segments like political interviews and Q & A with politicians.

Next, we discussed conventions within the genre of children's books. The convention of talking animals, which I thought was very common, didn't show up in any of the books that we looked at. I thought this was really interesting because it proves that even though something might be a convention of a genre, it doesn't mean that it is necessarily used in every example of that genre. We also looked at an example of something that included many conventions of a children's book, yet it was not geared towards children at all.

On Wednesday, we started class with a journal about summaries, why we use them, and what's included in them. Student 4 wrote that "we summarize to get out the juicy parts of a larger picture" and student 3 wrote that "you can summarize an author’s main argument." I thought that these descriptions were very accurate because a summary is meant to describe the main ideas of the original into a piece of writing that is shorter and maybe even easier to understand.

We then practiced using visual literacy when we reviewed the reading by McCloud. We summarized the important elements of this article, including the big ideas of moment, frame, image, word, and flow. Later, we looked at sample WP3s and these examples helped me think of other ideas I could use in my WP3. I think seeing some previous WP3s allowed me to better understand the assignment and what is expected of us when we actually turn in our final drafts.