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ReVise: Reworking Texts

"Defying Female Stereotypes in the Matrix"

Bryn's reflection on project: "In my Final Presentation, my improvement is most evident, for I restrained from depending on plot summaries and instead offered concrete “visual and spoken rhetoric” to support my argument that The Matrix portrays Trinity in such a manner that defies socially accepted female representations in cinema... I take evidence from the film and other resources and utilize them to forward my argument."

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1. "Where is the Love: UT Edition" Sofia's reflection on the project: "One of the reasons why I enjoyed this course was because of my personal care for the topics I chose to write about. It has always been important for me to feel engaged in my work, and I felt like this class allowed me to challenge my writing in newer and unexplored ways...A specific moment was when I couldn’t decide what paper to use to create my video presentation. I knew that using the SnapChat paper would probably be the easy way out, so I did what I had been doing all semester and chose to use the most challenging paper of them all: the one with Foucault. Although I omitted Foucault form the video presentation, explaining and forwarding his concepts was especially challenging when your only evidence was modern hip hop music. To eventually get my message across, I decided to create my own evidence that forwarded not only Foucault’s message, but also the one by the Black-Eyed Peas."
2. "Me and My Selfie" Rachel's reflection on project: "...the digital tools and skills required for the final presentation provided me with the opportunity to gain digital skills I otherwise wouldn’t have explored anytime soon. I hadn’t really had much experience with iMovie or video downloading and editing prior to this project, and the assignment definitely took me a lot longer as a result of this, but I did gain experience, knowledge, and skills that I will without a doubt be using in the future."
3. "A Chance in the Western World" Sean's reflection on presentation: "From high school to my first year at UT, my writing has been strictly formal due to the nature of the countless research and rhetorical essays I had to write. The rather sterile and emotionless tone that I conveyed in those papers had come back to haunt me and, in fact, I am glad they did – without reassessing my intentions of evolving as a writer, I would have never learned to experiment with my own writing style. A significant factor in this newfound experimentation was the highly constructive environment of the class. My views of how my own academic, personal, and rhetorical writing should be have changed from a formal structure to one that is more experimental through welcoming class discussions which have broken me free from complacency. This concoction of positive reinforcements has played an incredible role in helping me explore and enhance my personal writing style without sacrificing the main objective of each piece...I strongly believe that my video presentation proved the extent to what I am capable of in terms of the goals of this course, the course strands of rhetoric and digital literacy, and the learning dimensions of the use of prior experience, creativity and imagination, skills and strategies, and confidence and independence. Overall, this video revision is what showcased my abilities in combining what I have learned in this course in terms of writing as well as my talent in forming beautiful and impactful content. The video presentation also outlined my writing’s improvement towards the end of the semester in addition to my strengths in conveying a condensed, yet coherent piece of content."
4. "Defying Female Stereotypes in the Matrix" Bryn's reflection on project: "In my Final Presentation, my improvement is most evident, for I restrained from depending on plot summaries and instead offered concrete “visual and spoken rhetoric” to support my argument that The Matrix portrays Trinity in such a manner that defies socially accepted female representations in cinema... I take evidence from the film and other resources and utilize them to forward my argument."
5. "Sarah Connor Becomes a Masculine Hero" Katelyn's reflection on the project: "Personally, I believe that focusing more on the specific rhetoric a story, movie, or article, uses to persuade an audience has been helpful to understand and examine my own argumentation style and how to adapt it to my different audiences...Most of all, I think this final project really helped solidify the goal of the course “Revise compositions, incorporating peer and instructor feedback,” (Syllabus) since I knew I first had missed that key piece that would really strengthen my argument after the original feedback and in the end it became a project I was proud of. Another component of the final project that became a learning experience for me was understanding how to utilize the tools available to me. The library resources provided by the in-class presentation as well as the quick how-to on using Audacity and the movie maker program were vastly helpful for me, having never done a project like this before. It helped me achieve another goal from the syllabus: “Utilizing library resources, research the literary, historical, social, and political contexts of ‘dystopia’” (Syllabus) in a way that I hadn’t originally anticipated."
6. “The Young Women of Battle Royale” Tori's reflection on project: "To continue, the final presentation wrapped up the class and allowed us to put the skills and strategies we learned through out the semester into our own argument. Like this assignment, the final presentation gave me the opportunity to showcase what I learned about rhetorical analysis and I feel that it is my most compelling form of evidence. I used another learning dimension, use of prior experience, and applied it to this assignment. My experience as a Radio-Television-and Film student helped me decide on what kinds of visuals I needed to boost my argument. Upon completion I was told that, “Your presentation is very well done. You combine high-quality visuals with your argument, which not only makes a strong argument about the individual characters but also brings in a counter-argument”. Collaboration, strategy, and past experience helped me the most when developing my final presentation and I feel that it defines my overall improvement in this class."