Reflecting on Overcoming Stereotypes of Being a Middle Child

We were so close. We almost made it. Just a few more weeks and we would have successfully made it through exams without any sort of project. Let alone the formidable group project. A school like Wake Forest has an intellectually devoted and leadership based study body. This could also translate to a student body full of students who always ended up doing an entire group project on their own in high school, so the prospect of being tasked to complete a group project, let alone one that has to be a multimedia presentation, loomed over us.

Faced with our previous struggles of group projects, we dreaded Project 4. However, much to our surprise, we each openly enjoyed working with one another. Without Sarah’s autoethnography, Alex acting as the dad, Lillie’s organization, and Gabby’s sense of being realistic, this project would have been a lot more difficult. Even though we struggled with the overall thesis and altering this paper into a video for a popular audience, we each brought different talents to the table that allowed us to work well together and overcome these issues.

The Process

Coming into this project, our group was apprehensive to working on this joint project because we have all had bad experiences regarding group projects and feared the worst coming into this one; but thankfully, our fears did not come true. This fear was immediately relinquished after our first time meeting, where we talked about general ideas for the project and whose autoethnography we would use. After reading each other’s Project 3’s, we all were in agreement that Sarah’s autoethnography on middle children was one that we could do a lot with. We started a Google Doc and a group text as a means of sharing all of our notes and arranging times to meet. In terms of responsibility, we all came up with parts of the script, recorded our own voices, and appeared in the video. Alex did a lot of the editing because the video was on his computer, and the rest of us worked on citing all of the pictures and articles that we used.

The Triumphs

While our project did not fall victim to just one person doing all the work, like most group projects, we still came across our fair share of our problems. One of our biggest problems was finding ways to improve the overall information included in Sarah’s auto ethnography. For example, even though Sarah did synthesize her sources in her auto ethnography, we were not sure how to improve upon this, but ultimately decided that since we were appealing to a more popular audience, it would be beneficial to synthesize our sources and information in a more explicitly clear way.

Instead of talking about one source at a time, we attempted to blend them together so we could play each source off of one another. This way, the audience would have an easier time understanding the information being presented to them. In the first stereotype, we discussed the article Review of 200 Birth Order Studies: Life Style Characteristics (D. Eckstein, K. Aycock & M. Sperber, 2008), and then went on to explain why birth order is the way that it is by using The Pecking Order to show that it centers around the attention each child receives from their parents (D. Conely, 2004). Since children tend to receive less attention and are stuck in the middle, literally, of many situations, they tend become very talented negotiators (C. Salmon & K. Schumann, 2014). Later, we discuss that since they receive so little attention, they often try to fight for more of it, causing them to be considered “the worst” (D. Buss & P. Hawley, 2008). Parents in return will show them less attention, because they are interpreting their actions as aggressive and immature (N. Newbert, 1969). Allport explains that as members of an in group, we find enemies with those outside of our group (G. Allport, 1954), and Sarah explains that she sometimes finds her enemies to be her siblings, since she never receives the same amount of attention as they do.

Overall, our group worked very smoothly, having little to no problems. Everyone contributed, was accessible, and had enthusiasm. There were a few challenges that our group faced, but we were able to work through them all. The first biggest challenge was our thesis and figuring out how to make it more specific. We tackled this problem by thinking about our own personal experiences and family relationships. Lillie and Alex, both middle children, were able to relate to Sarah’s auto-ethnography and added their own ideas and experiences in order to strengthen the thesis. Our next challenge was making this auto-ethnography appeal to a popular audience, despite using scholarly sources. For this, we tried organizing it in a way where we had scholarly evidence about middle children, followed by personal examples. The personal examples were in the forms of videos, pictures, narrations, and interviews. We tried to use a lot of humor in the videos in order to appeal to a more popular audience, all while getting our scholarly sources communicated and exemplified. Our group did a great job of communicating ideas clearly, being productive, and also having a good time working on this together. We had a very positive group work experience and thoroughly enjoyed getting together to share ideas.

Rhetorical Strategies

In our video we used rhetorical strategies that would appeal to our popular audience to convey our argument that there are positive derivatives of being a middle child, even with the negative stereotypes associated with this particular birth order. Usually for a scholarly audience, there is a more serious tone and it is a formal way of writing, which is the type of writing used in Project 3.

To fit our popular audience, we incorporated some humorous video scenes that presented our points in a comical and relatable way for the general public. We also added pictures of celebrities that a universal audience could potentially know, such as Chris Pratt from Parks and Recreation and Alexandra Cabot from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. We tried to persuade our viewers using Aristotle’s appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos. Pertaining to our ethos, or credibility of the rhetoric, we incorporated reliable scholarly sources and pictures of authors, which conveys our argument through solid evidence. To build our ethos, we added captions to the pictures we used in our video in order to guide the viewers that may not be aware with Sarah or Lillie and their families. Logos, which appeals to an audience’s intellectuality along with logic, is apparent in our video through our organization. We present our findings in a way that is easy to follow for our viewers. We start with an introduction video, thesis and then we follow the same pattern for each stereotype of being a middle child.

Scholarly sources are introduced with reasoning behind the researcher’s ideas and Sarah’s personal experience is used to show how those stereotypes either haven’t applied to her or how she has overcome them using the qualities she has acquired from being a middle child, for example negotiation. In an attempt to appeal to the viewer’s emotional side, we added relevant pictures of Sarah growing out of the stereotypes to provide the viewers with a visual aid of her journey. Using Sarah’s personal story gives a chance for the viewers to connect her experiences back to their own family. Touching upon the stereotypes of middle children feeling unwanted, remaining overshadowed by their siblings and not getting enough parental attention, makes the viewers feel sympathetic and nostalgic. Looking back, it would have been interesting and made our argument even stronger if we incorporated other rhetorical strategies like kairos to grow as rhetorically aware communicators.

Conclusion

The combination of our four minds became a melting pot of ideas from filming ourselves in the car to adding a Sister Sledge song in our credits. Our group embraced the joint project with a sense of humor that became evident in the final video. Despite the strong opposition coming from our group, we eventually found entertainment in working together and adapting our rhetoric skills.

Transitioning Sarah’s autoethnography from a scholarly audience to a popular one was challenging for our group. This was our first time adapting a piece of writing, and we saw a significant difference between the two types of audiences and the necessary rhetorical devices used to persuade each one. Our growth as rhetorically aware writers increased a tenfold during this project. We began completely unsure how to articulate our ideas in a video format, and in the end, successfully created an engaging and thoughtful video auto-ethnography, which will help us adapt future pieces of writing also.

Alex Althans, Lillie Burrow, Sarah Deihle, and Gabby Milando