A Project Through the Eyes of Allie

Not so long ago in the land of the Williams Building at Florida State University, I was assigned a Key Word newsletter project in my Writing and Editing in Print and Online  (WEPO) class. The idea was that each one of us in the class would be assigned a key word to do with rhetoric and composition by our lovely instructor, Kara.

Upon first hearing that the class voted to do a newsletter as opposed to a magazine, I was a bit disappointed. I was in favor of a magazine article because I’ve worked on newsletters in the past and thought a magazine article would prove to be more interesting and original. The only real up side to the newsletter was the fact since I had worked with them before; I already knew how to set one up.

Once I heard that my assigned word was “memory”, though, I perked up a bit. I was thrilled not to get stuck with a difficult term like “rhetorical theory”. Not having taken the Rhetoric course requirement as of yet, I’m learning the key terms completely new and without any previous background information on them. It was a little stressful at first. With a word like “memory” I can have a little fun with some of the newsletter articles and titles.

My very first though on how to make a memory newsletter fun was to incorporate songs with the word “memory” in them in any way possible. Yes, my ideas included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s song Memory and Fall Out Boy’s Thanks for the Memories . I wanted anything that would catch and hold our assigned audience’s, First Year Composition students, attention. 

After the first day I was assigned the word, I more or less didn’t think about it until one of our brainstorming days in class. The assignment was always in the back of my mind but I didn’t really do anything with it. I was hoping that some kind of creative spark would go off and set ablaze some inspiration for the newsletter. During our brainstorming session in class, though, I found an extremely useful website on Google which went into detail on the various canons and had a particularly well written explanation of memory.

This is why Google is my search engine of choice. Google has yet to let me down when it comes to beginning research. So thank you, Google Gods, for pointing me in the right direction.

After my beginning success, though, I ran into a bit of a creativity block. I began racking my brain for ideas and ways to incorporate song lyrics with the word “memory” into the newsletter without being distracting. I had little success coming up with ideas, so sadly I had to let the idea slide a little bit. Over that week or so, other than coming up with an extremely rough outline of how I wanted the basic layout of the newsletter to look 

like, I did very little work on the project.

This is normally not how I like to go about a school project, particularly for a class that I enjoy. Unfortunately, as it tends to do sometimes, life just kind of got in the way for a while. Stress consumed and overtook me for a brief time period and energy was directed towards other events which had quicker approaching deadlines. I think every student can just about relate to that feeling.

Strangely enough, I had the most down time to focus my attention on the newsletter project during the most time crunched and event packed weekend of all: my cousin’s wedding. This wedding was no easy feat to attend, let me tell you. I had to drive four hours in order to get to Tampa, then flew from Tampa to Chicago, then Chicago to Green Bay and then drove two hours from the Green Bay airport to the resort where my cousin was having her wedding. And all that travel was to stay in Wisconsin for 36 hours until I got to repeat the process over again.

Anyway, it was during the crazy traveling process that I managed to get most of my work done. I spent my time at the first airport finishing up my research for the project. The hardest part about this was finding information that did not have to do with memory in the psychological definition but rather in the rhetorical definition. I actually didn’t have too much trouble with this, thanks to Google and JStore. 

It was while I was on the first plane flight from Tampa to Chicago that I started experimenting with different newsletter templates. It took a while to find one that had a good amount of color but also had colors that were fairly gender neutral. I think I succeeded pretty well using a pale blue and some yellow. Once I actually got to work and figured out the template, the writing came pretty easy. 

By the time I arrived in Wisconsin, I had finished putting the final touches on the newsletter. It turned out pretty well I think. I gave a good amount of information without using language that would go over the audiences head and I think I succeeded in making it interesting using fun titles and pictures. 

After I finished I decided to celebrate at the wedding. In the name of Captain Jack Sparrow’s motto “Wedding? I love weddings! Drinks all around!”

The end.