Reflecting on the Life of an Introvert

The discussion of introverts is both a fascinating and informative topic. Working on this project allowed me to learn more about myself and about my introverted friends. One aspect that I think we did very well was incorporating our evidence into our video. In the class workshops, we received positive reviews on how the evidence flowed throughout. While I am very pleased with our video and how smoothly most of the work went, there were a few challenges along the way. Since I was not an expert in the topic, I had some trouble in the beginning of our project coming up with ways to depict introverts in media. This was solved quickly with Caroline’s help. Reading Caroline’s project three and listening to her ideas on introverts allowed all of us to better understand the topic we were working on. Another rhetorical decision that we made was finding the best way to incorporate our evidence so that it would appeal to our audience. We decided to do this by keeping the same general purpose that Caroline used in her project three. Our purpose was to show that more often than not introverts are presented as inferior and that all the things that make us so unique are often looked down upon. We wanted to show that these misconceptions that exist about introverts were untrue and prove that introverts are extremely happy and proud to be the way they are. We all had the same goal, so it made it easy to work together as a group. Looking back on the work that we accomplished, we are happy with our successes and the progress that we made.

— Brendan McCree

Evidence: Transitioning evidence from a paper to a video presented some challenges for our group. We had to think about our audience and how we could make our purpose clear to them. So, we had to transform the literature review and personal accounts into a format suitable for a video.

The first job was to introduce myself as an introvert and the best way we saw fit was through old family photographs. I began the paper with a picture of myself which showed how destined I was to become an introvert. We decided to flash series of childhood pictures of me as a method of pathos and to make the video extremely personal for our audience. It was a method of pathos in the sense that we tried to evoke sympathy, so that they could try and better understand just how central it is to who we are and how clear it can come across in photographs. We felt that family photographs would add to the intensity of the video. Isabelle had great ideas for powerful images with her illustration of misconceptions and then the footage of the space for solitude an individual thought. The idea of the misconception illustration came from when my group first read my paper and a few of them were unsure as to what an introvert actually was. We thought this would be a powerful way to show the words that they had often associated with being an introvert. This evidence is relatable for our audience because many people probably share the same idea. The following sections are where we did the bulk of our literature review. We used the footage of Isabelle wandering around the conservatory and thought bubbles to reiterate the key components of an introvert. We knew we had to synthesize the review even further for our audience and purpose. An audio of me reading my entire paper would not appeal to them or even myself for that matter. The thought bubbles illustrated an introvert’s need for reflection while exploring the social and learning environments. We went with citations within for credibility as well as in the end. So, in the end we thought illustrations would help with “showing” and “telling.” We incorporated the “telling” with the voice narration and tried to make it very clear what our thesis was.

We did not feel that it was extremely difficult to transition the paper into a media format. It was time consuming to change the format, but ultimately we each divided the evidence amongst our strengths and volunteered for certain aspects. Our clear storyboard made it much easier and we met multiple times throughout the week to edit the video or shoot more footage. Our group was great at communicating and exchanging ideas. We pushed each other for stronger evidence in hopes of an extremely effective video. — Caroline McLaughlin

Finding The Audience: A major part of the rhetorical situation is the intended audience of the work. For Caroline’s project three, her purpose was to show to others that introverts were not lesser because they learn and interact in different ways. This purpose made her audience very broad. She wanted her audience to be everyone but introverts, so she could spread awareness about the truth of introverts. We kept this same audience in mind when we worked on project four. We wanted to create a video that would not narrow the audience to a single age group or a single background. We wanted to raise awareness so, the video had to reach everyone and be found interesting by everyone.

We accomplished our goal of reaching this audience in a number of ways. We started by making the video personal. Since the video is Caroline’s personal story, we decided to have her narrate it to make the video personal and relatable to the audience. Also, in an attempt to be relatable to a large audience, we used personal stories and pictures from Caroline’s childhood. Since the audience is either adult or in the process of becoming one, they could look back on their childhood and find a piece of themselves in those stories and see how they are not that different from an introvert. Finally, we tried to show the audience how different people can be introverted, hoping to show how common it is. We did this through our ending with the clips of people saying that they are introverts.

Overall, we worked well as a group to find ways to reach our target audience. With the audience being as broad as it was, we did a good job of not excluding any groups and not focusing too much on one section of the audience. The video, hopefully, will be relatable to the whole class and any others who see it. — Garret Bader

Group Efforts: Comparing all the projects we had assigned for this class, WRI 111, this is the only one where we had the chance to work within a group setting. Our group has four members, each bringing different valuable assets to the table.

While working together we were able to unite our ideas to bring forth what we all thought was best for our project. To unite our ideas we met-up for the first time to discuss a “story board” on what our final product might look like. With the deadline for this first step in our project, we were forced to begin forming ideas right away. This meeting involved sharing what we thought the important parts of Caroline’s project three were and exactly how we were going to represent her words visually. This meeting happened the day before Thanksgiving break was going to begin. Before we all went our own ways for a whole week it was crucial to discuss our ideas for the video.

As this meeting before break was so important, we were able to complete our plan of discussing our visual ideas. At this meeting I came up with the visual idea that while we shared research information we would film someone walking around with a voice-over. Garret Bader visualized when the paper discussed their internal process that we should use thought bubbles to evoke this sense of self-reliance and inward reflection. Caroline McLaughlin knew that she had pictures of herself playing soccer, so she visualized her personal experience section of the paper as a voice narration with pictures of her playing soccer. Brendan McCree had the idea that we could end project four with people in the social in-group of introverts stating proudly that they were an introvert.

Garret, Caroline, Brendan, and I all brought forth our visual form of an excerpt of project three and worked together to form an iMovie production.

Honestly, we all believe that connecting with each other was not as hard as you might think. We all shared the same goal, and we all were willing to put in the time to achieve that goal. We created a group chat to organize multiple meetings. For example, I sent the message, “Meeting at 2:30 in the lib?” sent at 1:04pm

Caroline quickly answered; “Is there any way we could move it to 2? I have another meeting at 3:00 sorry!!”

Isabelle: “That works for me”

Brendan: “Fine with me either way”

Garret: “That works”

It was that easy to all meet up. At these meetings we shared what we each accomplished or any other ideas. With the technology we had, we easily were able to send all our work to one computer. Once we found new things to work on within our video, we distributed the work evenly and set new deadlines.

Working with a group was extremely beneficial because we brought our ideas together through communication and even created some new ideas together. — Isabelle Harouche

Final Thoughts: Looking back on project four we think that it went a lot better than anyone anticipated. We think everyone in the class has had pretty bad experiences with group projects so far and assumed that one person would take on the responsibility of doing all the work. This was not the case for our group however. Right off the bat we communicated well and divided up tasks evenly and fairly. We faced an early deadline, which was probably the hardest part of the project, and we all pulled our weight to meet it. That really set the pace for the rest of the project. There is not much that we would change about how we did our project. We worked well as a team and got everything done on time without rushing. Collectively, this project has changed our perspective on group projects and it turned out to be a pleasant experience for all of us. We challenged each other and came up with innovative ideas for our project by working together and as a result we created what we think is a powerful video.

Garret Bader, Isabelle Harouche, Brendan McCree and Caroline McLaughlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR68GlCLaq8