Interview Project Teaser

For my project, I interviewed one of my professors and two other students here about ADHD, Adderall, and stress in college. I am compiling all of the interviews as well as my own narration into an audio essay. I’ve been working with Audacity and haven’t had too many issues yet. It’s my first time using this type of program so it took me a little while to figure it out, but things have been going pretty well since then, although I do find the editing process very tedious and time-consuming.

I posted a clip of the introduction on Soundcloud. After the intro, the song will fade out and I will give a brief introduction to the topic and then will begin incorporating the interview material. The link should take you right to the clip. Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/abradley16/intro-clip 

Decisions, Decisions: Should I Take Adderall?

This is not finished yet… some additions are still to come, plus I may play around with the colors more.

Using Olympic Rings to Represent Relative Populations

I found this infographic of the Olympic Rings used to show the distributions of certain categories, such as percent of households with TVs, child mortality, prisoners, hazardous waste, and others, between regions of the world. Each color ring represents a different region (red= Americas, blue= Oceanic region, black= Europe, yellow= Africa, green= Asia), so for each category the sizes of the rings are manipulated to show the rankings of the regions and their relativities. All of the examples can be found at this website below, as well as a video of the rings morphing and changing size.

Olympic Rings Infography

I thought this was a really interesting and different way to show the information, and a lot more visually appealing than a chart or graph or just a list of numbers and statistics. It plays on a logo that mostly everyone is familiar with and makes it easy to compare one region to another.

In order to recreate this, I would create two layers, one with a circle of the color and one with a white circle. The white colored circle is then placed on top to make it look like just the color outline, and the layers are merged. The only issue I had with this process was that I couldn’t figure out how to resize the objects, so I had to get it right the first time or delete it and try again. Also, my circles aren’t exactly the correct proportions, but I tried. I thought this would be easier than it actually was, so I guess that shows how little I know about Photoshop. Here is my recreation of the proportion of McDonald’s Outlets around the world.

I thought that this would be an interesting was to represent data from my own issue. Perhaps I wouldn’t use the colors to show the regions of the world, but maybe I could have them represent other subsets, such as age, gender, region of the country, or other possible factors. More research would have to be done to find such statistics of populations, though.

Purpose and Publicity: Who are we Writing For?

When we are writing “for the public,” it is implied that the piece has a specific purpose in trying to connect with its audience and benefit those who read it. The word “for” is key here. Writing for the public is done because the author believes that he or she has some information that is advantageous for the public to know, whether that be an important argument in the midst of a debate or a special report on doctors looking up their patients on the internet. When trying to cater to an audience this way, authors must think about what the public really wants to hear and needs to know in order to be successful in getting the message across. A report could be significant, but if it is not delivered in a style that is pleasing to the public, it won’t have the right effect anyway.

Take, for example, the multimedia piece on animal rights from the Rolling Stone magazine website. Including text, pictures, and video is a strong way to deliver a message since it caters both to audience members who like to read text and those who just want to see images. The destination guide used pictures, short descriptions and bright color schemes to appeal to readers, trying to ensure that the goal of attracting readers is reached.

An important distinction to make is that of the difference between writing for the pubic and writing publicly. Writing publicly is more narcissistic in the way that authors who do this are writing for their own personal expression and assuming that other people will care enough to read it. The purpose of writing publicly is simply to put one’s thoughts out there into the great abyss. Perhaps it will move someone else, but there is no specific intent.

This line can be quite fuzzy, however, as there are some similarities between the two.  Anything done publicly is fair game for all to see, and those who are putting their writing out there are aware of this. Thus, one could say that even if an author is writing publicly for self-expression, they want others to see it for some reason and must have motive for doing so. Likewise, writing for the public and public writing can both have the same end effect in swaying an audience. Those who write publicly may just be putting their opinions out there, but if they seem credible, readers may consider the piece as a source of information.

Social media forums walk the line, depending on what they are used for. Personal Twitter accounts are public writing, since tweeters are really just thinking out loud (or writing out loud). However, certain Twitter accounts are used for public relations and advertising, or even for putting up pictures of cute animals to make people smile. Similarly, autobiographies are written by authors to tell the story of their own life and to explain who they are. This seems like a case of writing publicly, but some autobiography authors believe that if others know their story and what they went through, it will help audience members get through their own struggles.

In my own opinion, the main difference between writing for the public and writing publicly is purpose. However, like I mentioned, purpose can be hard to discern, especially in today’s world of the Internet. It is so easy to make everything public, so how can we really decide the purpose of each and every piece of writing? Are we so inclined to think that others really care what we have to say, or can we really just want to express our opinions for the sake of expression? Authors will do what they choose, but it is up to the public to decide how to handle what they read.