Differences of Research Papers and Creative Writing

Throughout all my years of schooling I was never asked to write anything creative. It always seemed to be a response to a book in an English class or a research paper on something scientific or controversial. This has always been fine with me because I can definitely say that I tend to not be as much of a creative of a thinker as one need to be to be able to write a decent creative story. I have always stuck to the facts and given my two cents on them. For example the most creative I had to go in high school was deciding which controversial topic I wanted to write a research paper on, which obviously is not creative at all. I have always have had a tendency to prefer writing research papers due to the way I think about things and the general characteristics of each of these types of papers.

When writing a research paper it seems easier because all that is required is to get the facts on each side of a topic and decide which one you support more. Once this is decided it is easy to give the supporting evidence you find and even give your own input on this evidence. Through doing this you can even challenge you with the opposing evidence and refute what is said. This has always been the one type of writing I have been able to be decent at. This is definitely a more logical type of paper and is something that is much easier for someone with my mindset to do.

In a creative writing project it is necessary to basically go from scratch and tell a story with no set end or beginning. I prefer to be able to rely on facts that are either already given or that can be made and not have to create a brand new story out of scratch. I have never been to just come up with stories off the top of my head and that is definitely something that is useful to be able to do if you are going to write a creative story. The mindset needed to write a creative paper is one where you must be able to think “outside of the box,” and be able to just come up with twists and turns in a plot in a story unlike just having cold hard facts and deciding if you agree or disagree on them.

Digitial storytelling: reunion

In the first place, I was so nervous about writing this digital story telling because I didn’t think that I truly understood what is that means. Also, I thought the topic maybe the problem. That is the first time I wrote English story and posted it on public space. I never wrote something in English and posted on the Facebook to tell a story or something else. Fortunately, I have an American teammate that he helped a lot to help me correct grammar and edit structure of sentences. Generally speaking, we got the job done and did it ok. Our story is trying to express a simple idea: a simple moment could be significant, and a moved story will occur any time on any one in our daily life. Life is that simple and magnificant.

We didn’t have too much time to get this project done, because our due time was right on the midterms week, all the spare time we had was night. We contacted each other couple times to coordinate an available schedule to do this. We had some debate about what was our story topic. Also, we had different ideas about the story telling. I think that the most difficult part in doing the project is how to come to an agreement with our teammates. We decided to write this short story because it was simple and ordinary. This story is not completely frictional; we just edited some scenes and their names. It didn’t have a significant thesis in this story, like those heroes created legacy in ancient time, or an innovation changed the whole world. We picked this story because it just like something could happen around us in daily life. Troy picked name for the two characters to make it sounds more native. We discussed a lot about the whole story structure, emphasizing that the start should be smooth and natural. I thought up that Duke knocked on the door because when we wrote this story I just thought up that a mailman knocked our door at that afternoon. We all agreed that it was very daily; it just made the process of the story went smooth. Dialogues between two people was simple, we wanted that simple. “I am your uncle, Duke” seems like sudden, but that was the best we can do… We definitely cannot write an awesome drama script! But still our story is definitely a good material for movie. 

Searching good pictures was not a piece of cake. Actually, this was Troy’s idea, insert some pictures and let those pictures talks for us. What is the most charming in novel or story is words let people imagine, inserting pictures will help readers create more imagination in mind, just like watching a movie. We got that green-eye picture from Internet and edited it a little bit with photo shop; just made it looks greener. The best picture we found is that two people carrying the huge heart, it explains that love maybe the responsibility that two people share. We thought that this story started from two people’s absence of responsibility. And I suggested that we should use that last picture as a cartoon one, it just made the whole story warm. Family should be relative to warmth, and this relationship between people seems like more precious in this world. This is what we want to express in this short story.

     

New Writing Perspectives and Exploration of Different Mediums

A medium is the platform on which your art is created on. Writing has many different types of mediums from print, to digital. In this project, it was the art of story telling and the medium was the Internet. More specifically the medium was Google Plus. This project, being my first fictional writing assignment online, introduced to me different mediums that writing has to offer such as Internet, print, and additions of audio/visual props to enhance the effect of story telling and to help allow myself to become a better and stronger writer.

I had mentioned earlier that this assignment had been my first-ever online fictional writing. In all actuality, I really enjoyed doing this. I really liked building the story off of the other stories. Being the last group to write also was also pretty cool. I was able to gather and absorb the information from the past stories and tie them all together with a few twists of my own. I really liked having total control of the outcome to the whole story. This, however, was a little bit of a challenge compared to the first group to write. The first group gets to choose whatever they want to write about. I was fairly limited because I had to stick to what the story had already given me. It was a good experience though and I would not be upset if I were assigned another project like this in a future class.

The different mediums of writing were things that I had never really thought about before this class. The medium I had only experienced was print. Research papers, essays, and everything else were all written on a print medium. The Internet and blog mediums that were introduced to me in this class changed my perspective on writing. Writing online for an audience was the biggest change to me. The medium of Internet blogging and Google Plus includes an audience to read.  This was a bit of adjustment for me because I had to alter the style of writing I used. I tried to make it so that the audience could feel more engaged and to fully understand the points of the story I was trying to get across. To do this I included visuals including hyperlinks and pictures. This was also a first for me. Never had I ever before integrated these other medias to show further understanding of the story.  

The new mediums have taught me how to enhance the effect of story telling. Through Google Plus and Internet blogging, I have learned how to use these new mediums effectively through audio/visual aids and directing writing to the audience. This project has also taught me how to adjust the adversity of having never done something before. This writing technique was new to me. So, going though it has taught me a whole new style of writing. Due to this, I have become an all around stronger writer. This was one of my goals for this course and this project has allowed me to achieve this.