Project 2: Repurposing
Remember your college essays? I certainly don't, and became a little queasy upon accidentally stumbling across one of them. My writing was appalling and although I wasn't a great writer back in high school, I'm pretty sure I wasn't that bad. Give a naive 17 year-old a prompt like "Why Penn?" though and what could they possibly say that isn't beyond shallow. (Uh like why not, right?) So as a satirical critique of the essay process, I decided to comment on the essay in a similarly ludicrous manner.
Aside: One of the requirements for the E-Portfolio is that we include every draft of at least one project. I chose this one!
Rough Draft
For this draft, I was much more concerned with content than aesthetics. As a model for satire, I looked to the Onion. When compiling the Pros/Cons list at the end of my project, I tried to emulate specific conventions used in this article.
This draft accomplished my goal of humor pretty well, but it was not quite in line with my purpose or genre. The humor I used was very sarcastic, but not quite satirical; that is, it was not seriously looking to expose the flaws of the college essay process. It was more so just making fun of my bad writing.
I've left my author's note at the top of the document for further introduction.
Quick note: When viewing, please read the essay first, and the comments as they show up. Please do NOT just skip to the comments. This way, you'll get a feel for how terrible my original writing was, and in turn, how foolish the essay process is as a whole.
2nd Draft
Moving on from the rough draft, I altered my humor from sarcastic to satiricial. Also, I focused on aesthetics, deciding to write comments in red ink on a print-out of the actual essay. While I accomplished my purpose much more effectively, the physical appearance of my project was still lacking. The comments were bordering on illegible.
You can view it below:
Final Draft
I decided to write my comments with a finer pen, which easily fixed the legibility problem. Also, I added a "Final Thoughts" section to the end of the essay in order to properly wrap up the project. I'm very pleased with how it turned out!