The Danger of a Single Story
Project Description
The project “The Danger of a Single Story” is a writing piece and book cover project, where we picked a country in the southern part of Africa to research and base our story off. I was intrigued by the country Zimbabwe. I chose this country because I really liked how the country had so much history and interesting facts about itself. Knowing this information I knew that if I ended up choosing this country I would be able to write an interesting and meaningful story for my teacher, the audience, and myself. We were given the choice of choosing an extra credit project. On the list of choices I chose to make the program. I used photoshop to put it together.
Take-aways and Enduring Understandings
I found it really interesting to learn the history of how Africa has been colonized to what it is today. It was really emotional to hear the stories about what the europeans did to the native people who lived there. I really wanted to show this throughout my story to make the readers of my story feel what I was feeling when I was being taught about the colonization of Africa. The danger of a single story is when a Story based in Africa is full of stereotypes. Our main goal for this project was to write something that wasn't stereotypical and was different then “normal” African stories.
The Writing
I’m very proud of how much refinement I put into my writing piece. After each critique from one of my classmates I took it very seriously and spent a lot of time to tweak it and make it better using the advice my classmate said. I also helped when we had to read the paper in front of a partner, I felt like this helped because you would hear the parts of the story that wasn't too clean, or didn't sound right being read out loud. I feel like if I haven't read my paper out loud to someone it would harder for me to catch the mistakes in my paper. The most challenging part of writing my story was getting it to be long enough. I felt like my story was’nt long enough at all (three pages.) The range we need to have our story in was somewhere between four pages to eight. Barely getting my story dragged out to an almost four pages I felt like their was nothing left for me to write about. If I were to make my story any longer it would be way too dragged out and the story would be very boring. If I had to change my story I would change the way I decided to write it. make it more clear and easier to read. My favorite part about of my story was this description “I pinned back the left side with a blond bobby pin and pinned back the right side with a black colored one; neither of which was my hair color.” We had to try and show and not tell to describe our characters.
The Art
For our art piece we had to make a book cover for our short story. I really wanted my book cover to be not stereotypical. Like most of the book covers you see for African based books, usually include a silhouette of an acacia tree, A big yellow sun, and the color scheme of yellows, oranges, and reds. I choose a dirt road since my story incorporated a dirt road.
Personal Growth
After writing this short story I felt like I am a much, much better writer than I was before. It was fun for me to see how much detail I can fit into only four pages of writing. It was hard to tell a whole story in that many pages. I am pretty happy with the amount of refinement I put into my short story overall.
The project “The Danger of a Single Story” is a writing piece and book cover project, where we picked a country in the southern part of Africa to research and base our story off. I was intrigued by the country Zimbabwe. I chose this country because I really liked how the country had so much history and interesting facts about itself. Knowing this information I knew that if I ended up choosing this country I would be able to write an interesting and meaningful story for my teacher, the audience, and myself. We were given the choice of choosing an extra credit project. On the list of choices I chose to make the program. I used photoshop to put it together.
Take-aways and Enduring Understandings
I found it really interesting to learn the history of how Africa has been colonized to what it is today. It was really emotional to hear the stories about what the europeans did to the native people who lived there. I really wanted to show this throughout my story to make the readers of my story feel what I was feeling when I was being taught about the colonization of Africa. The danger of a single story is when a Story based in Africa is full of stereotypes. Our main goal for this project was to write something that wasn't stereotypical and was different then “normal” African stories.
The Writing
I’m very proud of how much refinement I put into my writing piece. After each critique from one of my classmates I took it very seriously and spent a lot of time to tweak it and make it better using the advice my classmate said. I also helped when we had to read the paper in front of a partner, I felt like this helped because you would hear the parts of the story that wasn't too clean, or didn't sound right being read out loud. I feel like if I haven't read my paper out loud to someone it would harder for me to catch the mistakes in my paper. The most challenging part of writing my story was getting it to be long enough. I felt like my story was’nt long enough at all (three pages.) The range we need to have our story in was somewhere between four pages to eight. Barely getting my story dragged out to an almost four pages I felt like their was nothing left for me to write about. If I were to make my story any longer it would be way too dragged out and the story would be very boring. If I had to change my story I would change the way I decided to write it. make it more clear and easier to read. My favorite part about of my story was this description “I pinned back the left side with a blond bobby pin and pinned back the right side with a black colored one; neither of which was my hair color.” We had to try and show and not tell to describe our characters.
The Art
For our art piece we had to make a book cover for our short story. I really wanted my book cover to be not stereotypical. Like most of the book covers you see for African based books, usually include a silhouette of an acacia tree, A big yellow sun, and the color scheme of yellows, oranges, and reds. I choose a dirt road since my story incorporated a dirt road.
Personal Growth
After writing this short story I felt like I am a much, much better writer than I was before. It was fun for me to see how much detail I can fit into only four pages of writing. It was hard to tell a whole story in that many pages. I am pretty happy with the amount of refinement I put into my short story overall.