Looking Inward and Reflecting on the Effects and Advantages of Left-Handedness

Adversity is something that we overcome every single day, from bouncing back from a bad grade, to finding time to do your laundry, we beat some sort of challenge each day. However, this type of adversity was different. No longer were we dependent on ourselves, but rather we became reliant on the work of others. This was due to the fact that we were assigned our first group project with a special twist, to focus all of our work around the life of one of our members. Not only was this our first group project in this class, it was also our last major assignment which made teamwork even more important to ensure finishing the semester strongly. The tricky part was focussing all of our efforts into Dave’s project and almost becoming part of him. We had to go from delving so in depth into our own in-group’s and quickly shift our attention and put all of our focus into one specific idea. This new challenge also served as another opportunity to overcome adversity and work together as a team to accomplish the project. We faced a couple of challenges with this project but our main focus was taking Dave’s paper and turning it into a video. Furthermore, emphasizing the purpose of the video (left handedness and its effects on baseball, other sports, and personality) while keeping the popular audience in mind was a key focal point of ours during this process. We had to communicate Dave’s topic effectively to a much broader audience while still maintaining his purpose. Another one of our main focuses was to show and not to just tell and this lead to specific rhetorical choices and how we went about creating our video, such as image selection. Overall, working as a group proved to be a challenge but at the same time allowed us to grow as writers and as students by putting all of our efforts together and focus on a single topic.

We faced two main challenges throughout his project: communication and adaptation. This was the first group project any of us had undertaken at a college level so one of our biggest challenges was an issue that faces every group, communication. It was a difficult initially to meet together between Cat and Dave’s sporting commitments and the general business of college life. However, we overcame this by using our shared google doc as a way of imputing new ideas and developments. One of Helen’s biggest challenges was editing the video because she had only worked with iMovie a few times before. Joshua’s biggest challenge was finding ways to contribute and tasks to do since he did not know how to use iMovie.

Since the video was being put together on her computer, Helen became an organizational leader to ensure that we met deadlines which was a challenge for her as she often does not like to delegate what others need to do. However, it helped to have deadlines to ensure that everyone sent their voiceovers, film, and images to her in a timely manner to ensure that the editing did not happen at the last minute. We also had a group text and would use that to broadcast meeting times and places that we decided as a group. We learned early that communication was key and outlining intentions and dividing work from the get-go was probably one of the most beneficial things we did to ensure things happened on time. At first, we lacked on the communication because we were apart from each other over Thanksgiving break and got behind on the project, but soon realized we needed to communicate deadlines in order to finish the project in a timely manner. We created a storyboard early on in the project which helped with the structure of our filming because as we divided amongst each member of the group. As such, each person was responsible for the script, pictures and video in their own section. Because of this we could all be productive even though we were apart from each other and once we all did meet up we could collaborate and edit as a team.

Another one of our problems was adapting the autoethnography for a popular audience. We all read Dave’s paper and had to attempt to understand his story like it was our own which often took a lot of explanation and further research from other members of the group. Dave’s biggest challenge was attempting to communicate his autoethnography or story to us but he really did help us understand the implications of being a lefty in baseball. He did this effectively by providing us with anecdotes that we tried to include these in our project as seen when he talks about his superstitions. We realized that we needed to obtain more specific evidence in order to communicate our argument further and gain more credibility. Overall, we have met the challenges that were presented to us and worked through them as a team overcoming some adversity with grit.

The rhetorical strategies that we used in the video were chosen based on our purpose and target audience. Our audience is the everyday viewer looking to learn more about this unique in-group but also someone who does not want to be overwhelmed by confusing scholarly jargon. Our main purpose is to portray Dave’s life story as a left-handed pitcher accurately and effectively while including scholarly sources to creating a conversation about left-handedness in baseball, in other sports and its relevance to personality. We decided that it would be most logical for Dave to narrate the parts of the video that pertain to left-handed pitchers as seen in the beginning part of the video where he provides the viewer with personal experiences. This appeals to ethos by showing that he has had first-hand or rather left-hand experiences and is a credible source. It would not have sounded appropriate if another group member had narrated this part since it was Dave’s personal story. We ensured that Dave’s tone supported what he was saying, specifically in the beginning and parts talking about the struggles of being left-handed. This appealed to pathos because of the emotion in Dave’s voice that showed his enthusiasm and passion for the topic, like when he talked about his superstitions.

The parts of the video that give statistics, background information, and discuss other research on left-handers are narrated by the other members of the group to add the “they say”. These sections appeal to logos by giving specific statistics and information about other left-handed athletes and also act as a “they-say” portion of the video which brings Dave’s personal experience into a conversation with researchers about why left-handers are unique. In a way, we were trying to act as the researchers. Another rhetorical strategy that we used in the video was the style of the video. Because we were speaking to a more popular audience, we chose to style the video as a news documentary about left-handers in sports. This inspiration also came from watching the “Always A Fire” video about Chad Jones and his determination to recover from his leg injury. You can see this in our video as we used video of student-athletes at Wake in the weight room lifting and filmed Dave throwing. In “Always A Fire” we see Chad undergoing rehab and conditioning in a similar setting. The legitimacy was important to give our video credibility and ethos and so we showed the facilities and the technical side to sport. We also chose to make our photo and image choices reflect what was being said in the video so that there was no confusion for the audience. This showing and not only telling was very important in the video making process because it meant that we needed to find images that was both related to the topic and supported what was being descrubed in the video. For example, we compared right-handed and left handed pitchers one after the other in order to show the similarities or rather the differences between the two and highlight what made a left-handed pitcher so unique. We did this so the viewer could understand what we were explaining by matching narration to footage.

There are a few things our group would like to improve on or continue to revise if we were given more time to do so. For example, we would like to add even more synthesis and more research to our autoethnography to strengthen our argument that left-handedness has a distinct and significant impact on baseball, other sports, and personality. Although we did improve on this throughout our process by incorporating some more popular sources such as the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, we would have liked to have found more as this would have added more ethos to our argument. If we could have put more sources in conversation with one another and add to that with Dave’s personal experience our argument may have been more lucid.

Additionally, it was challenging to find research on this topic and relate it back to baseball, other sports, and personality. We chose to do Dave’s autoethnography because it involved sports and thought it would be interesting to learn about such a unique topic and to visually represent that with some baseball footage or sports images. However, we did not realize how the lack of definitive evidence would affect us later. Because this is a very unique topic, much of the research was inconclusive or simply suggestive rather than definitive. However, we tried to use this to our advantage by stating that Dave’s personal experience served as the gap in the autoethnography by providing a unique perspective to the broader group of left-handers. We may have been less stressed had we started with more detailed information rather than having to spend time finding it, reading it, taking notes on it, and then incorporating it to the autoethnography. For example, we could have considered doing Joshua’s autoethnography, which had lots of evidence already and could have played more with sound. We also would like to improve on the tone and fluidity of our voiceovers.

Although we tried to make our narration as casual and conversational as possible, we were also trying to sound serious and professional at the same time. I think if we had more time to further revise our project we would consider re-recording our audio one more time to correct any stumbles and make things sound a bit more natural. As we went through the process we discovered that asking Dave the questions we wanted him to answer made him respond more naturally and treat the camera more like one of his friends.

After working on our first major group project as college students, we have learned a lot and grown from this experience. For the first week or two of the project, we collectively felt a bit behind and were a bit lost in how to approach the challenge of turning a formal and scholarly autoethnography into a video for a more popular audience. However, once we came to office hours and started to see what other groups were doing during the peer response workshops, we began to get on track and clarify what we had done well and what needed work. We felt much better about our project after getting feedback from Professor Giovanelli during office hours as it helped us target specific areas of our project such as being specific in our examples and adding the “so what?” and “I say” to our video. Once we interviewed Dave and filmed him explaining his own personal experience of being a left handed pitcher, we saw that our argument had much more ethos as Dave was explaining his own personal story and supporting our research.

We also learned the value of working as a team. If one person did not do their given assignment for a day, that put someone else behind. Thus, it was important for all of us to add the links to our images for our assigned sections to the google doc so that Joshua could cite them and Helen could import them and organize them in iMovie. If one person didn’t get their pictures uploaded, that put other people behind. Like any group project, communication is often a challenge but is very important. In the beginning of the project, we didn’t communicate as well and in terms of stating what we needed to get done and who needed to do what. However, throughout the project we utilized our group text and specifically stated what we needed to get done before the next class and who was to do it. This reduced some of the stress of the project and helped us feel more organized.

Although we learned a lot from working together in a group and learned how to improve upon strategies that had not been previously working, perhaps the most important realization we came to was that writing is not always simply words on a page. Although we had talked about this in class and had begun to see the truth to this statement through video examples, it helped to do it ourselves. Going through the process of literally translating a written autoethnography to the screen allowed us to see that videos are a form of writing as they can communicate a distinct idea in perhaps an even better way since they provide visual information such as pictures. By realizing this, we decided to use many pictures that reflected the words we were saying in the voiceover in order to make sure that our purpose was clear to our audience and that they could understand what we were talking about since they cannot go back and reread sentences. Although we had our challenges, we ultimately were able to share our ideas with one another respectfully and create a video that adds to the conversation of left-handedness and baseball.

Cat O’Connor, David Peljovich, Joshua Gibson, and Helen Morgan