Re-Purposing an Argument
The “Re-Purposing an Argument” assignment was the second project of the semester. This project challenged students to take a piece that they have already written (my original piece is here), and repurpose that pre-written document into something intended for a new, different, audience. In order to do this, students had to change an aspect of their argument.
This was by far my favorite project this semester. I am always thrilled to do assignments where I have reference or work with a piece that I have previously written. I am so fascinated in my growth as a writer and a thinker, and I enjoy monitoring my evolution. For this project, I chose to take a piece of written text from my Winter 2014 English 225: Academic Argumentation course. In the original document, I explored the effectiveness of Gil-Scott-Heron’s use of cultural allusions in his spoken word “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Scott-Heron’s piece was composed in 1971, which was not that long ago, but is not the same world that we are living in today. Thus, I thought that it would be exciting and challenege me as an artists to utilize Scott-Heron’s piece as model for my own spoken word about the “revolution” and its portrayal in social media and media coverage. So basically, I attempted to speak in what I believe would be Scott-Heron’s words today.
Similarly to Scott-Heron, I referenced cultural allusions and even sarcasm to argue my point and I think that I was very successful at doing these two things. I worked really hard on composing and recording the written audio and if I had to do it again, I do not think that I would change any major themes in the work. If anything, I would have rehearsed my spoken word voice more often so that it was more powerful. Regardless, I am very pleased with the outcome, especially since it was my first time drastically changing one of my prewritten documents and composing a beat and voice recording.