My fully realized project
For my Writing 220 class, we went through two experiment cycles with the same origin piece. The fully realized project is the completed version of my first experiment cycle after multiple rounds of feedback and developing a deeper understanding of different forms of literature. For my fully realized project, I chose to do a tv show pilot script about students in a high school and why they cheat in their AP Chemistry class. There was a lot of work put into this so let's go through how we got here.
The Origin Piece
As a high school junior, I served as the online editor-in-chief for my school's newspaper as well as general staff reporter. Many of the students in the newspaper program were in rigorous classes, such as AP Chemistry, so when we all found out that students in the AP Chem program were experiencing potential repercussions due to students consistently cheating in the class. As one of the only seasoned reporters not taking the class, I took on the story, getting perspectives mainly from teachers about academic dishonesty. The emotional tension that went into this piece was very high as the situation was causing a lot of people, including my friends, major stress.
For MiW
At the time of writing the article, I had no idea that people I knew were cheating and essentially lying to everyone else about it. Students would use past people's notes and lab reports, students would share test answers, and do all sorts of crazy things to pass the class. To an extent, people justified their cheating with ideologies like "it's not really cheating because everyone does it" or blaming the teachers for not being sympathetic. Ultimately, everyone I knew who was panicking about the situation or the class is doing really well now, at great colleges or pursuing amazing careers. The stress in the moment relating to school, exceeds our understanding that the sun will rise in the morning and life will go on. Because the situation was so dramatic, I wanted to exacerbate the drama with a mocumentary-type sitcom because that just felt right.
Experiment 1 - TV show pilot
I am a MAJOR fan of Abbott Elementary, and I can proudly say that my sitcom took inspiration from Abbott. The first experiment focused almost solely on the teachers uncovering the students who were cheating to an extent, and I planned to continue on in "later episodes" with more student perspective. I got a lot of great feedback on this but ultimately the characters felt super boring, only occasionally funny, and not clearly following any plot points. I loved writing this but took a completely different route for experiment 2!
Experiment 2 - Erasure Poetry
This pathway was a lot less opinionated. With the poetry, I was taking from words that already existed in the origin and reformatting them to create a new meaning. This is entirely different from the first experiment where I took inspiration from people I knew to create the characters to my liking. I experimented with the form I wanted to do (i.e. complete blackout, partial blackout, etc.) and ended up deciding to allow the reader to see the origin piece almost in its entirety but with a sense of the same themes from the pilot.
Getting to the end
Ultimately, I had immensely enjoyed both experiments as I had never done either form of writing. I appreciated the feedback that my peers and Shelley had given to me and ultimately decided that my final piece would be a revised version of the script. I had initially tried to work within what I had, but it wasn't until a work day in class that I understood the direction I wanted to take. Shelley gave us the tools and the opportunity to cut up the things that we had written and paste them into ways that would help us. The pictures to the right show the only things I kept from my original draft and from there I did a complete rewrite.
The full fully realized project
This draft is almost completely student-focused. I love this draft because it is funny, the characters are better developed, and I have more of a plot developing. This is the first act of the pilot but I hope in the future to finish the draft. I incorporated feedback from my writing group as well as Shelley to make this as accessible and fun as possible but overwhelmingly had great reception to the draft.