My Portfolio: A Work In Progress…

Introduction:

Throughout my portfolio, I have explored and demonstrated different writing techniques and skills. I expanded my work from some of the skill sessions I had learnt from, such as the session about Journalism and also Show and Don’t Tell. These skill sessions taught me the skills I needed to write and expand my work in the ways I have gone on to do. A specific career field that I am interested in would be journalism or novel writing. Prior to writing and creating my portfolio, I completed pre-production research, the skill sessions included, as they have enhanced my understanding of what a writer does to achieve effective writing, but also by reading novels written in the same format that I have written mine, I have also researched poems and read other articles to gain perspective and a better understanding of how to capture my target audience.

Introduction: 1

I have chosen to write a series of letters from a young girl to her Dad. I decided to use this style of writing as I looked into novels using letters as a source of narrative and I got the idea from reading The Perks Of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. This inspired me as I found that each letter gradually became more and more effective and I wanted to put my own story to the style. My target audience for this piece, ranges from the young ages of 13 to the older ages of 30. My intention for this piece was to help people understand, that everyone gets scared, everyone feels pain, everyone deals with it differently. My writing process was difficult, as I struggled with writing as the character and writing from personal experiences, but I found Angel’s voice and made her pain understandable and relatable in it’s own way.

Letters To You

PART 1

April 3rd, 2005

Dear Dad,

I am writing to you because you said you would always be there to listen and right now i need some help. My thoughts do not fit in my head anymore, so here I am writing them down to find a sort of understanding of my mind. I need clarification. You’re so distant. Ever since mum left you’ve gotten sadder and deeper into your misery. I want to console you but your loud bark scares me off. I know you feel alone and lost in your grief, all I ask of you is to not forget I’ve lost too, I also feel alone and lost, and maybe our solution to this pain is to find friendship in each other. I miss your advice and guidance, I miss my mentor. Do you remember when we would go for those late night drives around town and we would just talk throughout the whole journey, and laugh… do you remember how much we use to laugh? Some nights I lay awake in my bed and reminisce on all the good times we had together as a family. Those happy thoughts give me enough peace to finally fall asleep. I can hear you awake all night listening to those sad songs, I just wish you would talk to me, how we use to talk.

Love always, Angel

April 11th 2005

Dear Dad,

It’s me again, I just wanted to say thank you for making me strong. Today I was faced with a situation which could of gone one of two ways, I chose to walk away and ignore the hyenas fighting against me. That’s because of you. I could hear you in my head telling me that I was better than this and to not let them get into my head, to lower my standards to their level of pettiness would be beneath me. I walked away with my head held high and knew I had done the right thing. All up until the point when one of them ran after me and pulled my hair. Yes, I was calm up to that point. Unfortunately, I turned around and punched her straight in the face. You will be receiving a call from my school shortly, I’m sorry. I know that I get my temper from you and that’s why you always understand me. Sometimes I wish I could come home to a house full of family and hear “dinner on the table in 20 minutes kids!” then proceed to go upstairs to my room, get changed for dinner and enjoy family time, but that would be all too normal. We have never been normal.

Love always, Angel

April 30th 2005

Dear Dad,

I know I haven’t written in a while, I’ve been distracted. Seeing you wallow in your pain hurts me deeply. Your signs of sadness have become too obvious to ignore, the quietness in your voice that once ranged louder than a lions roar, the slow pace in your stride when before you marched with power and strength. I know your heart is broken, I know you want things to go back to how they use to be. I know life has beaten you down and kicked you around more times than a football on a school playground. I know. I wish I could make everything better again… I know you’re still in there. It will all be okay in the end, if it’s not okay yet then it’s not the end. You taught me that. When I was a little girl, I believed you to be indestructible, a real life superhero if you will. From my eyes, you never got hurt, I never saw you cry, you were always so strong. Now, the pain in my heart has become physically painful as I watch you deteriorate. I fear you don’t have time for me anymore. I try to have normal conversation with you to tell you about my day so I can hear about yours too and all I get in return is, “Not right now Angel.” “Very Bigood Angel, but I can’t talk right now.” I feel as if I’m invisible sometimes. I wish you would tell me what’s going on. I got graded a B on my English test by the way, if you even care…

Love always, Angel

October 29th 2005

Dear Dad,

Cancer. Weeks to live they’ve said… I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know it was this wrong. You can’t leave me. I refuse. There’s so many thing’s we still have to do. Who am I going to call when I need advice? I will never eat a sandwich made with such consideration ever again, those perfectly cut off crusts and evenly spread butter and jam, everything you do you do with love. I can’t live in a world without you. It doesn’t make sense to me. Please don’t leave me, please fight and win. A world without you would be as lonely and empty as a ship without a crew, pointless. I wanted to tell you that despite our arguments and disagreements, you’ve always been my best friend and I love you, always and forever. My heart is racing while my tears roll down my cheek as I write to you, I’m scared Dad.

Love always, Angel

December 20th 2006

Dear Dad,

I miss you. A million times I’ve needed you, a million times I’ve cried. If love alone could of saved you, you never would have died. In life I loved you dearly, in death I love you still. In my heart you hold a place no one else can ever fill. It broke my heart to lose you, but you didn’t go alone, a part of me went with you, the day God took you home. I love you.

Love always, Angel

Evaluation: 1

For this piece of writing, I found it hard to put together as I personally can relate to the character I have created. I would say that an area that still needs development would be the beginning, as we could learn more about Angel’s life before her mother left and before her father became the way that he is. By expanding on the story, it could give the reader more of an understanding of Angel’s situation with her family. In comparison to ‘The Perks Of Being A Wallflower’ by Stephen Chbosky, I find that both stories address the characters lives and give the reader an insight into their minds. However, the techniques used and the style written in by Chbosky, allow the reader to become more intrigued overtime as they go on through the journey with Charlie. Whereas, in my piece, I have introduced the issues Angel is going through deliberately early in the story, in order for the reader to understand and interpret what type of story they are in for. I decided to keep the narrative to one voice, as I found this would make it more personal. To introduce other voice into the letters would allow the reader to think of another person, rather than just focussing on the relationship of Angel and her dad.

Feedback…

” I would say that it really struck a cord with me, and was profoundly moving and humbling. It’s nice to see pain and loss portrayed so naturally without it being seen as some heroic task that we’ve overcome. Sometimes it really is just simply hard, but we accept the pain and grow and you’ve captured that really well.” – Abiona, my friend.

Introduction: 2

For my poem, I have chosen to write about Acceptance as I believe this is a big issue for a wide majority of people. I looked at the work of other poets, in order to gather an idea of which style of writing I’d be using. I found a poet called Christal Carpenter, she had written a poem on Freedom and the style in which she wrote this poem caught my eye. I found it to be effective and capturing so therefore I wrote my poem with inspiration from C.Carpenter’s poem. Her use of rhyme and consistency throughout her poem, inspired my idea of my poem. My writing process was difficult as I struggled with finding something that I could write about poetically. Eventually, I was influenced by other poets and found Acceptance. For my pre-production research, I looked at the poems we had previously discussed in class, such as ‘Having a Coke with you’ written by Frank O’Hara, despite me liking the style this poem was written in, I wanted my poem to be simple yet effective and relatable to the majority of people who could read it.

Poem…

Acceptance.

All I want is acceptance

Is that too much to ask

All I want is acceptance

And clearance of my past

All I want is acceptance

To be loved for who I am

All I want is acceptance

To be respected despite the colour of my skin

All I want is acceptance

For all my ideas not to be thrown in the bin

All I want is acceptance

For you to see me as your equal

All I want is acceptance

So we can join our love and create the sequel

All I want is acceptance

To learn to love who I’ve been

All I want is acceptance

For it to come from deep within

Evaluation: 2 

For this poem, the use of repetition was important. This is because, the reader is constantly reading the main objective of the poem. ‘All I want is acceptance.’ The voice in this poem isn’t biased, it speaks out for the majority of misunderstood people. Also, the voice isn’t from just one person, it speaks out as a voice for the people. In the poem, the flow of it changes up in the line “To be respected despite the colour of my skin.” This was done on purpose, in order for the reader to feel the shift in flow, to understand racism isn’t another topic that will be taken so lightly. After writing this poem, I read it out a few times to see how it flowed and how it would sound out loud, I used this as a drafting tool and went on to change certain words or phrases in order to sound better. Repetition was important in this poem because, the constant reminder of the line “All i want is acceptance” doesn’t allow the reader to forget the main purpose of the poem. I thought to use an extended metaphor instead of the word acceptance, like how Emily Dickinson compares her hope to a bird in her poem, but I found the word ‘Acceptance’ to be beautiful. I have also used symbolism and metaphor in my poem, to create a better understanding for the reader, to create better imagery.

Feedback…

Introduction: 3

For this piece, I decided to write about the effects of Social Media on teenagers to adults, and how social media has a bigger impact on body shaming than we understand. With this piece, I aimed to reach out to not only teens but young adults as well, as social media has a platform for every age. For this article, I done research into social media and looked into other social media articles. I also watched interviews of people discussing the effects of social media, which I found to be very helpful.

Article…

What the experts tell us about the future of Social Media.

Information and communication technology has changed rapidly over the past 20 years with a key development being the emergence of social media, which thousands have been effected by. Social media has the ability to make you feel isolated from the real world, meanwhile receiving hundreds and thousands of likes online. This creates performance anxiety. The constant need and fight against yourself to receive more likes on your next post than you did on your last. A recent study showed that 41% of freshmen on social media reported to have extreme anxiety, compared to 18% of freshman in 1985. The statistics have tripled, the only difference between both studies being social media. Social media is an epidemic.

Social media will soon cast a divide on the public, those who use social media and those who don’t. There are just around 2 billion social media users today, “Are you using social media or not?” is a revolutionary thought. The daily use and exposure to screen time and social media, encourages depression, anxiety and suicide. The majority of teens have become addicted to social media to the extent of it increasing anxiety by 20% since 2007. We need to emphasis that screen time decreases happiness, life satisfaction and self esteem. Teenagers all over the world come face to face with these issues on a daily basis, but yet social media continues to grow and expand its addictive platforms. The Royal Society of Public Health published an article in June 2018, stating that 63% of all Instagram users are unhappy, yet accounts are being made each second of every day, allowing the addiction and depression to grow throughout our youth. This is not acceptable, I believe more action needs to be taken in order to prevent this from continuing onto the next generation.

In recent events, a 20 year old girl was crudely embarrassed and abused over social media, due to being date rape drugged at a club in Essex called Faces. Videos of the girl doing unimaginable things in the club, surfaced and spread all over the internet by the following morning. Meanwhile, this young girl, who will remain unnamed, took to social media and released a post stating that her drink had been spiked, her night went on to being raped by five men after she was taken to a hotel and attention was only drawn to her situation when the hotel staff called the police. While having to deal with this nightmare, the young girl had to accept the fact that there were explicit, indecent videos of herself circling the web. The girl has no control over these videos due to them being released onto social media platforms, and now has to deal with the fact for the rest of her life, that people she doesn’t even know have extremely indecent videos of her, doing things she never would of done having been sober. The speed in which a picture or a video can be spread over social media is shocking, disgusting and appalling.

A question that is commonly asked is, do unhappy people gravitate towards social media or did social media make them unhappy? (Vaknin, 2018) The answer is that the platforms have made them unhappy. Social media is toxic by design. The creators of Facebook and Twitter and other platforms have now gone public and admitted that they have built addiction and conditioned it into the platform, as there is no other way. You can’t encourage voluntarism or love and expect repeat usage, so it’s no wonder that these platforms have been used for hate speech and bullying, they were built for this. Anxiety and depression among 15-24 year old’s has increased by 70% over the last 30 years. Since 2010, teen suicide has climbed to 31%. These are not numbers we can ignore. Social media is a disease and it is spreading fast and wide. For the first time in human history, the leading cause of death for teens up to 24 years old, is suicide. To know that the majority of our youth feel alone, and suicidal is honestly heart breaking.

Social media has not only caused repercussions to our mental health, but it has also given bullies the platform needed to make the majority of teens feel insecure and unworthy of self love and appreciation. Teenage girls see models with bodies carved and created by surgeons and believe they are supposed to look that way, or else they won’t be desired. Body shaming has allowed over weight teens to feel unwanted in their own skin, and underweight teens to feel the need to hide at the sight of their appearance. The number of face to face interactions among teens dropped by 70% in the last 10 years. This is due to people being too caught up in their online persona, to actually leave their homes and meet with another human being and have an actual conversation. The biggest threats to social media are love, relationships, intimacy, togetherness, community, friendship, family. Anything that takes you away from the illusion that is social media. We have been conditioned against intimacy.

However, we can say no. We can stand against hate crimes and bullying, we can spread love and awareness to our friends and our families. Understand what you are getting yourself into before clicking accept to the terms and conditions, because you are accepting the addiction and anxiety that comes along with it.

References:  Vaknin, S (2018) Social Media, Toxic By Design.  Available at: https://youtu.be/wpvv_ooqJik  [Accessed on 14th December 2018]

Evaluation: 3

Writing this article was challenging for me, as I find it easier to write fiction. However, having done the research and having seen and read other sources of work relating to this topic, I found it easier to write about. I feel that I would have to write more articles in order to strengthen my abilities, as I am less confident in this area or writing. I aimed to inform with this article, I am trying to communicate with my audience about the effects social media has had on our generation. I aimed to write an effective opinionated piece, for the first line I wanted my hook to be captivating which i hopefully achieved. While writing this piece, I kept the 5 W’s in mind in order to better my piece and create the journalistic tone. Referring back to the Journalism skill session, I have used persuasive skills such as facts, statistics, rhetorical questions and emotive language.

Feedback…

“Very effective, reading this article has made me want to remove all of my social media! I would of liked to of read more about your personal opinion and experiences but other than that, I enjoyed it very much. I believe it is important for people our age and younger, to understand that social media is a dangerous place, and I feel you put that across very well.” – Beslim, my friend.

Evaluation / Conclusion

Overall, I found my portfolio to be insightful and I enjoyed writing each of my pieces. Each piece had a different theme and genre and target audience. I aimed to use emotive language in all of my pieces and also I used a range of literary devices such as metaphor, satire, similes, repetition and so on. For each of my pieces, I compared my work to the likes of other authors or poets or journalists, in order to reach the same level of professionalism in my work. I struggled with show and don’t tell in my first piece of work, and could develop the story more to show how her moods effect her daily life. For my article, I struggled with maintaining the journalistic tone, but aimed to achieve a factual informative article for those who read will learn from. I developed this piece by adding human interest and giving an example of where social media has been toxic to a persons life.