This I BELIEVE Project
Essential Question: What do I believe in and why?
The This I Believe program started in the late fifties as a radio show. This show had people, some famous, some just average joes, talk about what they believed in. Some of the people speaking included Albert Einstein, Gandhi, and president teddy roosevelt. This showed people the differing perspectives of the world. Earlier this year NPR decided to commemorate this by having high school and college students speak their own beliefs. Then we imitated the imitation, as a project. To help us get ideas for our essay/podcasts we listened to some of the old and new this I believes at “thisibelieve.org.” This really showed how personal these essay/podcasts were and inspired me in the endeavor of writing the essay.
The hardest part of the project was the personal writing aspect. Personal writing is very hard for me in the writing aspect and the personal reflection. I have never been a fan of writing but I had to improve so I worked hard at improving my writing for what I had to do at the time. I got good at writing in third person and using lots of factual evidence, but lacked in the personal aspect. I tried the scientific type of writing I was used to in my This I Believe essay and ended up writing about the causes and effects in World War Two shown in this passage “Because the Japanese decided to invade china they lost valuable resources and a war.” Though it was interesting I couldn't connect it to my essay, about mountain biking, very well. So I had to delete that chunk of my essay. Though this set me back I improved and expanded the personal parts of my essay like my story,and finished.
My growth in this project will be long standing not because of the self reflection, but improvement on writing about myself. A sI mentioned logical scholarly writing has been my go to for a while. This happened so much that I would avoid personal writing at all costs, like in this passage from the fahrenheit 451 project where I took a book with a lot of inner meaning about society and self reflection and talked about the cold war “Over 10 million copies of Fahrenheit 451 have been sold. What influenced Ray Bradbury to write this book? I believe Communism, the American prejudice against it, the threat of nuclear war, and extreme censorship in the U.S influenced Ray Bradbury to write Fahrenheit 451.” In this project I didn't have a choice. I struggled to make the deadlines, but it made me a better writer pushing me to expand my limitations.
The hardest part of the project was the personal writing aspect. Personal writing is very hard for me in the writing aspect and the personal reflection. I have never been a fan of writing but I had to improve so I worked hard at improving my writing for what I had to do at the time. I got good at writing in third person and using lots of factual evidence, but lacked in the personal aspect. I tried the scientific type of writing I was used to in my This I Believe essay and ended up writing about the causes and effects in World War Two shown in this passage “Because the Japanese decided to invade china they lost valuable resources and a war.” Though it was interesting I couldn't connect it to my essay, about mountain biking, very well. So I had to delete that chunk of my essay. Though this set me back I improved and expanded the personal parts of my essay like my story,and finished.
My growth in this project will be long standing not because of the self reflection, but improvement on writing about myself. A sI mentioned logical scholarly writing has been my go to for a while. This happened so much that I would avoid personal writing at all costs, like in this passage from the fahrenheit 451 project where I took a book with a lot of inner meaning about society and self reflection and talked about the cold war “Over 10 million copies of Fahrenheit 451 have been sold. What influenced Ray Bradbury to write this book? I believe Communism, the American prejudice against it, the threat of nuclear war, and extreme censorship in the U.S influenced Ray Bradbury to write Fahrenheit 451.” In this project I didn't have a choice. I struggled to make the deadlines, but it made me a better writer pushing me to expand my limitations.