Redesign Essay Reflection

Andie Goniwiecha

WRT 150

Prof. Rinke

3/20/13

Redesign Project Reflection

Going into this assignment, I was a little bit afraid of the 5-7 page requirement. However, after I read the guidelines and realized that there was a lot of material to cover in this paper I felt better. I was also excited about being able to be creative with this assignment when redesigning the advertisement. I was able to go into detail about what I had in mind for the new advertisement. I realized that it actually wasn’t impossible to write a five-paged paper, and I felt more confident in my abilities after this assignment was completed.

            I wanted to choose an advertisement that had a clear audience in mind, so that it would be easier to choose a new completely different audience. I also wanted to choose an advertisement that could easily be changed, that is nothing too simple or too complicated. Finding an advertisement about something that I have experience with and actually enjoy was helpful too when analyzing it in the first part of the paper.

            When coming up with the idea for the redesign, I took into consideration the distinct parts of the advertisement that made it clear who the original audience was. Once I figured those out, I could then change them to appeal towards my new audience. I did not sketch my new design out on paper, I just thought of it in my head and went with it. That way, I had a train of free-flowing ideas coming and going for me to choose for my paper.

            One challenge I faced as I began this essay was how to organize it. Since there was a lot of material to cover, it was important for this paper to be organized and logical. In order to do this, I made an outline of the main ideas I would cover in the paper and put them into the order that made the most sense. I then used that as a guide for writing my rough draft.

                        I really enjoyed the freedom and creativity of this assignment. It gave us a chance to use our imaginations and pick something we really enjoy to write about. For me personally, writing a 5-7 page paper about something I am interested in is a lot easier than writing about something that is predetermined by a teacher. So having this freedom made the writing process a lot easier and more enjoyable.

            The concepts I got out of this paper the most were the rhetorical appeals – ethos pathos and logos. I did not understand them that well before this assignment, but now that I’ve finished it I feel that I fully understand them, and how to spot and analyze them in an advertisement. I also learned that really long papers aren’t that scary if you have them well-organized and well-planned out before starting them.

            If I had  a second chance to write this paper again, I would have started off trying to avoid using the first person because I forgot to do that at first and I had to go through my whole paper and change it. There is not much else I would change about this paper, I feel that I did a pretty good job on this assignment.