Acerca de

Narrative:

Context

I created this piece as an assignment for my PWR 217: Professional Writing Technologies course during the fall of 2019. During the semester, each person in the class chose one topic that interested them and focused all six of their unit projects around that area. I chose bullet journaling as my topic because aside from its being my favorite hobby, it has become very popular on social media over the last few years, and many people I know have heard of the practice but do not know how to get started. Our final unit focused on audio editing; for the unit project, we were required to record some sort of audio-only genre (podcast, audio story, radio-style interview, song, etc.) and edit together a five- to ten-minute piece with music, transitions, and at least two “voices” incorporated.

Rhetorical Decisions

    I chose an audio story as my genre because bullet journaling has been a very personal experience for me and essentially “saved” me during a difficult period in my life, so I thought that telling my story could be inspirational for an audience of those who are interested in bullet journaling but are unsure about starting the practice for themselves. I started by revising a piece I had written for my personal blog about how I started bullet journaling so that it sounded more like natural speech. I then recorded and edited the story in Adobe Audition, where I was mostly trying to smooth out the “pops” in the recording. I added the instrumental music tracks to create transitions—I used a quiet, almost somber piece when I discussed several struggles in my life and changed to an upbeat track when I started talking about finding a solution to these difficulties in bullet journaling. Since the story focused on my life alone, the best way to add another “voice” to my project in my view was incorporating a song that I had referenced in my original post, which gave the piece dimension and tied it together. The song was also written by one of my high school friends, so I was easily able to get permission from her to use it, and it made the project feel even more personal and special to me. The project requirements only required turning in a .wav file, but I decided to make the project more accessible to a wider audience by creating a title slide in Adobe Photoshop, editing the slide and audio together in Adobe Premiere Pro, and uploading the video to YouTube.

Reflection

    Through this project, I gained experience using multiple programs and forms of media to create one piece, which I will hopefully be able to do again in a future job. I also improved my skills in writing for the spoken word, which has often been challenging for me as I am used to a more academic style of writing. While I received good feedback on the project from my professor and classmates, telling my own story in a new way was special in and of itself—most professional writing focuses on an outside audience, and I originally intended to do so with this project. But in reality, I was writing for myself above all else, which can also have its rhetorical place.