Abigail Fricke

Mrs. Stanford

ENG 231

24 April 2019

Issues That I Faced With This Project

At the beginning of this semester, I was given the opportunity to research, study, and

write about a debatable topic of my choice for my College English Class. After scanning through

a wide variety of websites, I decided to choose a topic that wasn’t on any list I had found;

Cheerleading. More specifically, though, the debate over whether or not cheerleading should be

considered a sport. With the amount of work I've done so far, I've successfully written three

essays: One where I analyzed the rhetoric used within two different cheerleading articles, one

where I proposed an argument against cheerleading as a sport, and another where I advocated

that a change in the cheerleading score sheets is what would be needed to make the activity a

sport. In addition to this, I have constructed a multimodal project with two of my classmates,

Aubrey Noll and Josh Thomas. The purpose of this project was to create and display a message

that shared similarities to all of our debatable topics through the use of multiple modes of

expression (music, color, images, words). When combing our debatable topics, we ended up

choosing a message about “Issues That Women Face Today”. For many reasons, this was a hard

project. In order to illustrate why, I will be accessing the​ “​Quality of the Project”, the  

“Collaborative Experience”, my “Understanding of Rhetoric, Argument, and Research Writing”

within this essay.

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When initially starting this project, a “Prezi” was thought to be the best mode to present

our message in. However, after a little bit of discussion, we decided that a “Google Site” would

be more appropriate. This is because a “Google Site” would allow our project to run by itself and

also would clearly separate each of our sections from one another. Within these sections, we

included modes such as quotes, pictures, and statistics. We included these for various reasons,

such as the pictures would allow our viewers to visualize what our issues looked like and

statistics would make our information credible. On the topic of information, we choose to

include only information specifically related to our issues. Anything else would’ve been too

confusing and would’ve made our issues seem too broad. Through this information, though, we

tried to incorporate the rhetorical appeal, logos, the most. We did this through the use of our

many statistics and because we wanted to have our information be as credible as it could. When

reflecting upon this, I think the use of the statistics greatly improved the overall quality of our

project. However, even with the statistics, the project was still not to the level of quality I

would’ve liked. As to be expected, I was pleased with my parts of the project but not so much

with Josh’s and Aubrey's. This is because they both produced very low-quality work and didn’t

even start that work until the day before the project was due. There are absolutely no excuses for

why they would do this: They had a whole week, plus a four day weekend to work but instead,

choose to play “Clash of Clans” and hang out with their boyfriend. This was very upsetting for

me because I had extremely high hopes for this project and worked very hard on my part, but

was let down by my other group members.

Moving on, I’ll now be discussing the roles we each had throughout this project. The day

we were grouped together, we decided that Josh would be responsible for the “Introduction” and
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“Violence” pages, Aubrey would be responsible for the “Athletics” and “Work” pages, and I

would be responsible for the “Politics” and “Conclusion” page, as well as a short snippet about

cheerleading within Aubrey’s “Athletics” page. As can be guessed, this is not was actually ended

up happening. First of all, I ended up creating, formatting and publishing the logistics of our

“Google Site” itself. This means I created the “Google Site”, put everything in the correct format

(Ex. Text boxes, borders, pictures, titles, etc.), and then published it at the end. In addition to

this, I did the “Politics” “Conclusion”, and, “Works Cited” pages, my short snippet about

cheerleading within Aubrey’s “Athletics” page, and upon Aubrey’s request ONE day before the

project was due, two-thirds of the “Work” page. When putting all of these things together, I can

definitely say I played a very large role during this project. However, I did have some

weaknesses as a group member. I think I came into the project with really high expectations and

so I sort of set myself up for failure. Additionally, I don’t think I was direct enough when I said

that we needed to have our project done sooner than the day before it’s due. As far as my actual

work goes, though, I don’t think I had any weaknesses. This was not the case for Aubrey and

Josh. Like previously mentioned, they both produced very low-quality work and didn’t even start

that work until the day before the project was due. Individually, Aubrey’s work was rushed and

basically just a copy and paste from her position essay (Yet, it somehow took her a week to do

that). Furthermore, she was very inconsistent with her formatting: I asked her if she wanted to

make the information within our subpages a paragraph or just bullet points and she responded

with a paragraph yet made her information just two or three bullet points. Josh, on the other

hand, had a lot of information on his pages but it wasn’t cohesive and just sounded like he had

looked up “Domestic Violence” on Google and copied/pasted sentences from the first five
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websites he saw. Additionally, he didn’t add any of the transitions we talked about (Ex. “This

portion of our website will be talking about…), my guess is that he probably just wasn’t

listening. Above all this, I even offered my help. I offered to help write the introduction and was

told no. On Sunday night when I realized that neither of them had anything on their pages, I even

fixed Josh’s thesis and added information in regards to their topics on our shared google

document so they would have somewhere to start when they began researching. To no one's

surprise, though, my help was never taken. That’s what made me the most frustrated. As a result

of all of these things, I would say that Aubrey should receive a B- and Josh should receive a B.

Through all of my work this semester, I had learned a lot about argumentative writing.

I’ve learned how to dig deeper within my topics, how to use rhehoric within my writing, and, just

the general idea that argumentative writing is harder than it looks. Additionally, I learned a lot

about conducting and using primary research. I learned that in order to get the best results, you

need to have an exact idea of where you’ll be using them and what you’ll be using them for. This

idea is definitely something I can take away from this course and apply in other areas within my

writing. Now that I’m wrapping up my final college composition course and this essay on

accessing the​ “​Quality of the Project”, the ​ “​ Collaborative Experience”, my “Understanding of

Rhetoric, Argument, and Research Writing” within this essay, another thing I can take away is

knowing my strengths and weakness. One of my strengths is just writing in general. I love

writing, so I was really fortunate to be able to take this class to work on it. Additionally, one of

my strengths in my dependability when it comes to group projects. Even if I’m not also happy

about my group, I try to find the best out of it and make sure that my group partners can depend

on me to get my work done. Lastly, I think another one of my strengths is my ability to help
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others. I’m constantly being asked for advice and to read/revise other people’s paper but I love

doing it so I feel really appreciative when asked. On the other hand, I can also recognize

weaknesses. I think when I’m not trying to make the best out of things, I can get really irritated

with my group partners. I would never be rude to them but I would be lying if I said I didn’t rant

to my mom after seeing the work they produced. Personally, though, I really struggle with time

management. I always get my work done, but I often spend a lot of my time just staring at my

computer screen because I’m unsure of what to write. These are all things I would like to

improve on and I think the only way to do so is to practice writing and keep taking classes such

as this one. So, stay tuned.