What I learned today

Today in class we did a project where we had to draw on a piece of paper about our ideas for project 2. By doing this project I learned many new aspects about the writing process. Though many people wouldn't think that drawing pictures could help you write and brainstorm about something, it definitely did.  While we were drawing pictures about the specific topics that we each had to do, it got our minds going and us thinking outside the box. At first we came up with our idea for our new blog project pretty fast, but then after that we were stumped.  Not having a lot of direction for the project was another road block we faced while trying to think about ideas. Since we were stuck about what else to do with our project, this activity in class really helped.  It made us think about other abstract ideas that we could make fit into our project. Before we did this activity we each came up with specific categories that each person would write about in their diary entry. The topics were: food, adventure, religion, and love/romance. This was as far as we had gotten before we came to class today. Once we started drawing and talking to each other we came up with different objects for each category.  For instance my category is religion.  All I could think about was to take a picture of a cross and have that relate to my diary entry about Bella (the girl traveling through Italy) while she was in the Vatican city. As my group and I were talking about my topic we came up with the idea to go and take pictures of crosses, a bible, a rosary, and other pictures that she may have seen in the Vatican while she was there. I do not consider myself very artistic, but I still found that this activity helped me think of more ideas for my specific role in the project. Not only did the drawing part of the activity help me think of more ideas for our diary entries, talking to my group members helped a lot.  We all helped each other and talked about each topic and how it could be improved.  I think that everyone in the group struggled with finding different objects to take pictures of that would relate well to the diary entry.  Especially since we cannot use pictures from the internet and have to take our own. Now that I have more of an idea of what to take pictures of, going out and taking pictures around campus will not be so hard for me to do. I think that this activity also helped me develop as a writer because in the future I can use this technique when I am doing other projects. Sometimes doing things that don't correlate directly to your project, like coloring on a piece of paper, help you in the weirdest ways. Overall I think that this project was a success and I really liked doing something other than just sitting on our computers!