Tommy's First Blog

I think the comments that I found from Professor Vincent on my assignments helped me a lot. While this course did include a lot of freedom of choice with picking the topics you wanted to do stories on, there definitely is a strict format to follow for each assignment. I feel like Professor Vincent really let us write they way we wanted to and let us express our ideas while also staying in a professional format. Her comments mostly had to do with formatting issues if we were not doing them correctly and also suggestions for improving the flow of our writing. I did not really look through her comments for my first assignment and I feel like my grade really suffered due to this. On our final assignment I thoroughly reviewed what she had suggested for me and I feel like my work was strides better than it was on my first assignment. I feel like I definitely learned better formatting from her comments but also how to cut down on unnecessary information that I did not need. I think in the professional sense, my writing has improved a lot throughout this course. AP style writing was definitely something I had no idea how to do before this course and I have learned a lot about in this class. I still struggle with it for sure, but taking the time to learn more about it has definitely improved my writing.

Well the last assignment we had was maybe my least favorite in the course so far, this assignment might have been my favorite one yet. Some of the strategies that we used for this assignment included using persuasive techniques like ethos, pathos, and logos to have a more impactful advertisement. I was creating an advertisement for the Red Hot Chili Peppers so I felt like pathos was the best use of persuasive advertising for their situation. They recently had an old member of their band return so I believed this could evoke some emotional appeal to fans of the band. The biggest struggle I had with this assignment was probably coming up with a video commercial for the band. I would need to use footage of the band playing live in concert to create an effective advertisement so this might be difficult. I will have to consider this more when I actually film the video commercial though and I feel like the other parts of the commercial will be doable. The peer editing gave me some good ideas about my advertisements. I thought I did a good job on the print and digital ads but it was suggested to me to change some of the font types and colors and I think this could really help me improve on this. I think working with peers on this assignment will definitely help me have a stronger final draft for this.

The multimedia public relations assignment was probably the most difficult one for me so far. I found it difficult to produce advertisements for the event due to the partnership. I also feel like we were requested to make our press release too long and I kind of just had to add nonsensical informational that made it read worse. Due to the event that we had to partner with being the Polar Plunge for the Special Olympics, I feel like I definitely tried to use pathos to draw the audience in. The Patriots were the organization I chose to partner with the Special Olympics because they are also a sports organization and are based in Massachusetts where the event was taking place. I had some trouble creating advertisements for this because I could really only promote the players and didn't have any product or service to promote. Peer review definitely showed me that my work wasn't really too great and I haven't finished editing the final version yet. I definitely need to make some revisions to strengthen this assignment because I am pretty sure this is my weakest work so far in this class.

One of the ways we can use persuasion to create effective advertisements would be to first grasp the attention of the audience. We can do this by presenting a startling fact or statement that will draw the audience in. After that, it is important to explain the need of the product that is being provided. This will allow the audience to understand why they need the product that you are providing. After that your product can be introduced and you can explain why this product addresses the needs that you were discussing earlier. Next you can provide a visualization of how the product will address the needs of the customer. There are three ways that this can be done: positive visualization, negative visualization, or contrasting both positive and negative visualizations. The positive view shows how your product will lead them to a more beneficial future. The negative view shows how without your product things could get worse if the problem is not addressed. Contrasting may be the most effective though because it shows the negative side of things followed by how your product will change that for the better. There are also reasoning strategies which can persuade an audience to buy your product. This goes into logos, pathos, and ethos which are ways of appealing to an audience logically, emotionally, and through credibility. Each of these strategies is unique and it may be better to use certain strategies for specific types of products.

I actually really enjoyed this assignment because we just got to write about a topic that was interesting to us and report on it. One of the strategies that I used was the inverse pyramid. This strategy includes putting all of the crucial information right at the start of your story and then including all of the other supporting information towards the end of the story. One of the problems I had with this assignment was finding a primary source. The event I was writing about was a breaking sports story, nowadays these type of stories are usually broken on social media so I couldn't find an actual document of a primary source. For the primary source I just had to use the reporter that first broke the news on twitter and used their tweet/the link to their story. The peer editing for this assignment helped out like it has in previous assignments. While editing another students work I got to see their unique perspective on the assignment and see some areas where they succeeded where I failed and vice-versa. The constructive criticism coming from a peer reviewing my story also helps a lot. Sometimes it is easier for another person to see your mistakes rather than yourself.

One situation in which a press release would be issued would be to release a new product or product line. The press release may include all the new details of the product that is coming out and when it will be officially released. The release could also include what target audience the product is designed for. An example I could think of is when Marvel announces that they are releasing a new movie. This just happened recently and the director of the franchise Kevin Fiege came out onto a stage and discussed all of the upcoming MCU movies that are going to be released over the next few years. The direct target audience for this release would most likely be any die hard fans of Marvel who consume all of the content they release. This would probably include all of the fans that attended the event and also fans that were watching from home or waiting for updates after the event took place. The secondary target audience could just be the public in general. Marvel is massively successful in the movie industry and their movies usually do extremely well at the box office, sometimes breaking records. Due to this fact they are trying to promote their movie to as many people as possible and if their press release can be shared to new audiences then that will only help them.

My website is still in its first draft and needs a lot of work to get it to where I want it to be. I think that I struggled to create my website because I wasn't really sure of the route I wanted to take and what my website would focus on. I may change it up later but I think I wanted to focus on keeping it simple at first and making sure that it was easy to navigate through. I think trying to write more professionally for my website definitely helped me and I know I had some grammatical errors which were pointed out to me by my peer reviewer but I think I did pretty well with the writing overall. Peer editing definitely helped me a lot with the website. The people who sent me edits were very thoughtful and provided me some insight on how to improve my website which is very important. I also feel like editing someone else's website can be very helpful as well. I got to see someone else's take on their website and how they decided to organize things. When editing someone else work sometimes you can find mistakes that you may also have made and it is sometimes easier to see when another person makes a mistake. Overall I think peer editing is definitely going to help me a lot with this assignment because I struggled on the first time around.

Writing a good lead for a story us one of the most important ways to engage with your audience and get readers to click on your articles. One of the first aspects of a good lead is ensuring that it is concise and informational. When writing on a story or event there are six key factors to keep in mind which are also known as "The Five W's and an H." These are who, what, when, why, where, and how. When writing a lead, all of these details are not necessary to give to the reader but usually who and what are given as these are the most important of the factors. This is the most important part of writing a lead along with not providing too much information because a lead should not be too long. Another important aspect of writing a lead is to make sure that all information is accurate and stands on its own. This means that the lead should not also act as the first sentence of a story. An example given in our reading states the lead as "Odofile Guinn is guilty of killing his wife, Judith Dandridge, and her friend Joseph Goldfarb." That statement was used as the lead and the first sentence of the story is: "That's what Prosecuting Attorney Elaine Chu told a jury in Los Angeles today." This is not the correct way to write a lead and a lead should stand on it's own with the story summarizing it. I am not sure what I am going to choose for my multimedia assignment for this week but one that I was looking into was Draymond Green asking for a max contract this week. The headline I might use for this would be: "Draymond Green believes he deserves a maximum contract from the Golden State Warriors."

This time I chose to use Wix to create the my website for my course. I found the Wix setup to be easier for me, I don't know if perhaps I was just working harder and more patient because it was for a school assignment but I was able to set things up a little better. I do plan on choosing a more niche subject for my website now and trying to make it more aesthetically pleasing for my audience. We did peer review for a classmate and my classmates website looked a lot better than mine I thought so I definitely want to continue to work on mine and make some major improvements. I feel like I rushed through on my first time setting up the website for this course, like I said I just got Covid this weekend so I think I may have just been really fatigued and not put the effort forward. My goals for this website are to provide an easy-to-navigate website that will display the content of my school assignments and give me some experience in website design.

I have done my fair share of peer review throughout my education before college as well as during my four years at Salem State University. In my experience peer review can provide a new way of looking at things as well as correct foolish mistakes someone else or myself have made in their writing; for instance grammatical errors. I think that peer review can point out a lot of your flaws, especially if you are making the same mistake over and over again. Perhaps it is something just ingrained in your way of writing that is incorrect and having another viewer could fix that mistake. There are times in papers when some people, myself included, go off on a tangent or maybe make a transition that is not very smooth at all. Once again in the writers eye and way of thinking they may be providing solid points but perhaps it doesn't make sense to everyone else. I feel like this is the best aspect of peer review, it provides a preview of your writing before it is released officially. Most people who are working on a piece of writing are putting in their best effort and trying to make it as great as possible so in their perspective their paper may be flawless. Once an outside eye looks at the paper they will be able to see if the paper could use any improvement without having a biased perspective. One way I think that I can improve in peer review is by letting my review be fully honest. Sometimes if there are too many mistakes, either grammatical or idea-wise, then I feel bad nitpicking and suggesting changes on everything. In the future I think it would be more beneficial for the writer to hear all my constructive criticism because it is what I would want, whether I agree with the criticism or not it is still good to hear what others are thinking.

I have worked on many different writing projects over the course of my education and I never really feel like I follow a precise writing process. My process does differ depending on what type of project I am working on but I would say that the project that I am most likely working on would be an essay for school. When I am assigned an essay I know that I have to start with a strong introduction that would bring a reader who had know idea what my writing prompt was some information. Let me use an example from one of my essays I wrote in one of my summer courses this year; the course was Geography of Africa and my paper was on how African cities have changed over time. So to present to a reader some of what I will be talking about I started off with "The urban areas of Africa have undergone quite the evolution over the course of the last hundred years." This sentence kicks off my paper to let the audience know that we are talking about Africa and how it has changed over time. Then in my introduction I continue to bring up the major points I will be going over in my essay. I'll use the same paper as an example; I then brought up the three major periods that I would be discussing in regard to the change of cities in Africa over time: the pre-colonial era, the colonial era, and the post-colonial era. I provided some small introductory details about each period when introducing them and then finished my introduction paragraph with a conclusive statement saying that the change in cities has presented Africa new struggles as well as opportunities. Having this strong introduction set up usually helps me keep my paper very organized when I am writing an essay. I feel like this may have come from the way I was taught to write five paragraph essays in elementary school. The first paragraph would always be the introduction, followed by three different paragraphs with different examples/points, and finally the conclusion which wraps everything up together. This style of writing works great for essays but unfortunately I seem to struggle on other writing assignments. Throughout this course I hope to find a more definitive way to layout my writing. Perhaps I do need different approaches for different types of projects but I love to learn new things and have an open mind so I am definitely willing to hear some other processes.

As I said previously, I think writing can be a great tool to educate the reader and benefit them in their life and education. I also feel like writing is extremely important for the writer's themselves. Sometimes I feel like writing down your thoughts and ideas can be therapeutic and help you think in a new way. I personally have been trying to write more myself and recently started a journal which helps me to reflect what has been on my mind and look at it in new ways. While I believe this has definitely helped me as a writer and in my life in general I do want to be more consistent with it. My original plan was to journal every day but it has become more of a once or twice a week type of thing. In my upcoming writing for media course I hope to learn a little bit more about the professional style of writing. I have always thought that writing has been one of my strong suits during my education but I know I have weak spots that I hope to strengthen. One of the major problems I face when writing is limiting my creativity. Like I said before writing is an entire different way of communicating than speaking. Sometimes I feel like I will be judged by my writing and people will think it is strange so I hold back some of my thoughts or feelings. My journal has definitely helped me in this regard because I am the only one who looks at it and I can practice letting my thoughts flow freely. I still do want to improve on this when writing to an audience though and I hope this course can help me with that!